about myself

Bry Sharland is an artist and art teacher. He grew up in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and attended Massachusetts College of Art and Bridgewater State University for undergrad. He holds two masters degrees, one from Endicott College and another from Fitchburg State University. His work focuses a great deal on portraiture and the use of bright, saturated, and often neon color. Bry primarily uses colored pencil, acrylic paint, and oil paint in his work. An enormous fan of Nintendo and Star Wars, he often uses these subjects in drawings. His favorite artist inspirations are John Singer Sargent, Jan Duursema, and Owen Rival.

Bry is the creator of the Pink Triangle Portraits Project, a quest to create a portrait of every single photographed queer victim of the Nazi regime and Paragraph 175. In these works, information about the victim is researched and shared with the portrait. Back in high school, Bry first started learning about the Nazi persecution of queer people and by college he was starting to create artworks to highlight lesser known categories of people that were targeted. One fact drove his desire to tell these stories was that queer people continued to be denigrated and punished even after the fall of the Third Reich.  

The lack of recognition and justice for queer victims drives Bry to continue his artworks until he has completed every single one of them. Through his work, he hopes people will stop, look, and contemplate those who paved the way for our rights today, and understand just how tenuous those rights can be around the world.

Besides creating art, Bry is an avid tropical and fruiting tree gardener and Nintendo gamer. Bry lives with his husband Brian and dog Luna in Raynham, Massachusetts.