Joe LeGrand – Thriving on the Edge of Uncertainty

Showing at: Brenda McMahon Gallery

Calm and Chaos: Paintings by Joe Legrand will be unveiled at the Brenda McMahon Gallery on September 1^st 2025, and run throughout the month, and an artist opening featuring the artist and live music will take place on Friday, September 5th, from 6–9 p.m. LeGrand is an oil painter, and the show depicts lively and energetic scenes from New York City, where he studied in art school. Jazz vocalist Sasha Tuck will perform live at the gallery during the event.

“The show invites viewers to step into each street and feel the pulse and pause of city life,” says LeGrand. “Whether bold or subdued, each piece uses the convergence of light, color, and perspective to tell a story about the urban environment, and to welcome the viewer into it.” LeGrand will return to the gallery on Saturday, September 20^th from 6–8 p.m. to meet and greet visitors for a discussion of his award-winning works.

Joe LeGrand doesn’t just make art—he lives it like a series of restless reinventions, each chapter folding into the next with the intensity of someone who refuses to coast. He’s the kind of artist who doesn’t settle, who won’t let a single medium define him, who turns his life into a continuous experiment in seeing, shaping, and transforming. To talk about LeGrand is to talk about movement—through schools, through industries, through mediums, through galaxies. His story reads less like a straight biography and more like a setlist, a career of riffs and solos that still somehow form a single song.

It started in Texas, where he ground out his BFA in Art and Design at the University of Texas. Those early years were about learning the fundamentals, about developing an eye sharp enough to catch light and shadow in ways that hit harder than words. But Texas wasn’t enough. Brooklyn pulled him north to Pratt Institute, into the sharp-edged world of industrial design, where art had to meet functionality, where vision had to make sense in the physical world. He was shaping objects meant to live in people’s hands and homes, bending aesthetics toward use. It was art under pressure, art that had to survive the demands of the marketplace. That duality—expression and precision—became part of his DNA.

Between those academic stretches, LeGrand spent time teaching art to deaf students at the Texas School for the Deaf, and that period marked him deeply. In a classroom where silence ruled, he learned how paint, clay, and line could bypass language altogether. He saw the way images worked as pure signal, emotion stripped of interference. For LeGrand, it was confirmation: art isn’t an accessory to life, it’s a language of its own.

Then came the corporate years. For most artists, stepping into a multinational like Bayer would be the death blow. But LeGrand wasn’t most artists. As head of industrial design, he pushed concepts into patents, sculpted products that were as much about beauty as they were about utility. Later, at Shell Chemicals, he slid into the high-stakes world of marketing and sales, navigating balance sheets and boardrooms with the same precision he once applied to sketches. It sounds like exile from the art world, but for LeGrand it was just another workshop—less canvas and clay, more strategy and innovation. The materials were different, but the mindset was the same: create, refine, deliver.

When retirement finally cracked the corporate shell, LeGrand didn’t retreat to golf courses or easy hobbies. He attacked art again, harder this time. Oils and acrylics poured out of him, canvases alive with narrative and texture. He turned to wood as well, carving and spinning raw material into objects that ended up gracing magazine covers. It was a rebirth, but not a nostalgic one. These works weren’t about recreating some imagined past—they were forward-moving, the work of a man who had been bottling up visions through years of board meetings and was finally free to let them spill.

But LeGrand wasn’t content to stop at paint and wood. The digital age called, and instead of resisting, he dove in headfirst. Armed with nothing more than his iPhone and a restless imagination, he transformed mobile photography into a playground. Apps like Snapseed, Procreate, and iColorama became his new brushes and pigments. He took photos and ripped them apart, layering and twisting them until they became something otherworldly—part collage, part hallucination, part exploration of what images could be in an era where reality and digital manipulation bleed together. If painting grounded him, digital art set him loose.

And then there’s the sky. In his latest evolution, LeGrand pointed his lens upward, into the abyss of astrophotography. Stars, galaxies, the unseeable infinity above us—he pulled them down into his work, framing the cosmos as just another canvas to experiment with. It feels like a natural progression for him: after exploring earthbound form, utility, and digital distortion, why not reach for the infinite?

What ties all of this together isn’t a single style or medium, but a relentless refusal to fossilize. Most artists, once they find a groove, carve it deep and stay there. LeGrand refuses. He mutates. He thrives on the edge of unfamiliar tools, strange mediums, new frontiers. That’s what makes him dangerous, what makes him necessary. His career is proof that art isn’t about a fixed identity—it’s about motion, about staying alive to possibility.

To look at his body of work is to see the arc of a restless mind. The oil paintings hold the weight of tradition, the sense of craft passed down through centuries. The wood-turnings speak to his designer’s hand, his ability to find beauty in utility. The digital collages are pure 21st-century chaos, layered with the frenetic energy of a culture that never stops scrolling. And the astrophotography feels like a reminder that art doesn’t end at the edges of our world—it stretches out into the black.

Joe LeGrand is not an artist who stayed in one lane. He is a shapeshifter, a survivor of industries and eras, someone who took everything life threw at him and bent it into another form of creation. His story is a kind of blueprint for what it means to live as an artist in a time when the mediums keep changing, when the definitions keep shifting. He’s not interested in preserving a legacy in amber—he’s interested in burning, in moving, in making the next thing. And maybe that’s the lesson buried in his work: that art isn’t a destination, it’s a motion. It doesn’t retire. It doesn’t calcify. It doesn’t let you stop. If you’re doing it right, it keeps you alive. LeGrand, even now, is proof of that—an artist who refuses to stop moving, who keeps turning the wheel, who keeps finding new ways to see.