At Home with Jereme Brian Mendez

The road to Jereme Brian Mendez’s house twists up away from San Francisco, through the picturesque Berkeley Hills, towards a wood panelled Eden with a view of Bay. When we arrive we’re greeted by two deer, who run across the street in front of the house and into the woods nearby, followed close behind by JB’s cat, Mousey, and then JB himself, who welcomes us in. “You guys came on the most perfect day,” JB says, and he’s right. As we spend the afternoon with JB, in his home, which doubles as his painting studio, the sun falls across the sky in front of the big picture window looking out over the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, casting the sky in beautiful deep orange. “You get a different view out of the window every day.” JB is a little tired. A few days ago his wife gave birth to their first child. We admire the house while they put the baby to bed.

It was built by an architect called Gary Fong, JB says, returning from baby duties, who was inspired equally by the Zen of Japanese architecture and the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of the houses nearby share a similar style, a Berkeley Hills Mid Century vernacular, all air and light and wood. JB moved here from Oakland, twenty minutes down the road.

“I was working for Aesop, living in Oakland, hopping on the BART to work everyday in the city, then the pandemic happened, and they furloughed everybody. For a while I didn’t know what to do, and it was around then that I first started painting.” He didn’t know exactly what he was doing, or wanted to achieve with the medium then. Mainly he was just experimenting with colours and materials, studying the greats, looking for inspiration.

“When the pandemic happened I got furloughed. For a while I didn’t know what to do, and it was around then that I first started painting.”

And now, a few years later, JB is increasingly becoming a very successful artist, but he took a circuitous to get there. The first part of that detour involved becoming a dealer of rare furniture. During the pandemic a lot of the people living in Berkeley and San Francisco started moving away, heading back to the East Coast, unsure of what was going to happen. There were many architects in the area, designers, people with good taste, and JB has always had a good eye, so he started buying up the furniture they were selling, pieces by people like Vico Magistretti, Carlo Scarpa and Achille Castiglioni. “Our little, tiny, cute apartment in Oakland started filling up with stacks of chairs, tables and lamps,” he says. “So we ended up getting a loft space that we could use both to live in and as a showroom.” The endeavour took off mainly by word of mouth, people would recommend JB to other people, he would source sofas and chairs and fixtures for people, and for three years he ran a successful furniture dealership, while also slowly but steadily developing as a painter. “Three years just went by and then one day I woke up and just got hit with the craziest depression.” He also discovered he was going blind.

“I was actually going blind in both of my eyes... I was so fixated on making these sales and meeting people and running my business that I didn't take the time to really check in with myself. So this depression hit me, it was just this giant wave of emotion that submerged me for an entire year, which was made worse by my eyesight problems.”

“I was told I could either get a surgery, which wouldn't guarantee my vision back, or get these experimental treatments that involved having injections in both of my eyes once a month. So I decided to risk having the injections, but after each injection I would be rendered almost entirely blind for a few days. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope all the time, that’s how I had to see the world. So I started painting how I saw.”

“I was going blind. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope all the
time, that’s how I had to see the world. So I started painting how I saw.”

As he slowly recovered from his depression, and slowly recovered his sight — the experimental treatment started working — he began to dedicate himself properly, and fully, to painting. He’s turned one of the rooms of the house into a studio, where he can paint all day long, Mousey pouncing around and getting under the foot. JB jokes that Mousey has, with the arrival of the baby, stepped into the role of the elder sibling with aplomb.

For all the depression and crisis that brought JB concretely to painting as an occupation, little of that darkness seeps into work. There’s a moodiness to the palette sometimes, deep blues and dark greens, but they are also full of space and light, his abstract compositions always leaving some space, both literally on the canvas, and also metaphorically, for the viewer. “Every single mark made on the canvas is so intentional,” he explains, “Sometimes when I'm painting, I feel like I'm making a sculpture. I want the viewer to really feel like they can dive into it, I want to feel like they’re holding onto it.”

What does he listen to in the studio? “A lot of my personality is in the music I listen to when I’m working,” he says. “My dad was a garbage man — he lived by the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure — and one day he found this huge binder full of CDs and brought it back for me. He was really into lowrider culture, and none of the music appealed to him, so he gave it to me. And it had everything in it: house, metal, hip-hop, Daft Punk and the Smashing Pumpkins and Tribe Called Quest, and I think that totally informed my taste.”

“Every single mark made on the canvas is so intentional. Sometimes when I'm painting, I feel like I'm making a sculpture. I want the viewer to really feel like they can dive into it.”

The whole house — the furniture, view, paintings, JB himself — is a testament to that taste. He just finished a project with Larry June, one of the biggest rappers in the Bay Area. It launched the day his baby was born. Fatherhood is the next project. “I love being a dad, he says. “I know it's only day six, but I feel like I was meant to be this. When my son sees a flower, I've already seen that flower a million times, but he hasn't seen that flower, nor has he smelled it, nor has he seen that color. I find that so inspiring. "It's not what I put on canvas, it's not what brand I work with, or where I'm at in the world. It's how you see the world, how you treat people, and your perception on life.”