About

Many passionate professionals have supported Braintone Art at various points in its growth, each contributing various specialized talents to the endeavor. Despite our varied fields of study and expertise, all have one thing in common: We love art, and we want others to realize the joy of creating their own art.

Jeremiah Howell
Co-Founder (Art Stuff)

Jacob Beaudoin
Co-Founder (Tech Stuff)

Braintone Art empowers you to easily create individualized quality studio artwork using only the energy of your mind.

Artistic creation for everyone is presently within reach. Braintone Art empowers you to easily create individualized quality studio artwork using only the energy of your mind. We place your art to canvas so you can take it home and put it on the wall for all to admire.

Why should a meaningful piece of artwork take two days, two months, two years, or possibly much longer, to create? Why do we need to wait for the right inspiration, the right moment, or gather materials we have no idea how to use to create a piece of individual expression to hang on our walls? Michelangelo was often displeased with his works, sometimes leaving them unfinished, and taking many years to find funding to complete some of his more magnificent works, such as the Sistine Chapel. Van Gogh, who concentrated on color as his chief symbolism of expression, lacked self-confidence and suffered from insanity, but was resolved to present happiness by creating beauty. To suggest that the merits, passionate discovery, and visual characteristics of old world master works directly compare to new world art movements is not our intention, however, the constraints of time, finances, and physical or mental disposition no longer need to be our barriers. Braintone Art offers an alternative means of creating art and does not attempt to replace tradition in any way.

This expression of art was explored and created by Studio Artist, Jeremiah Howell and Software Developer, Jacob Beaudoin. The process is available to anyone who wishes to create art. Keep track of the blog for announcements.

Dive a little deeper into the specific how's and why's. How has technology enabled our world, how do we apply it, and why does it apply to art?

Time has evolved our methodologies of thought and processes of creating tangible products. Concurrently, these have redefined our lives through their ability to empower us. Braintone Art is on the front-line of this evolution. Once, artists were only recognized by their ability to place beautiful images on a canvas with their hands (or feet or mouths). Who says a true artist is one that must use these means to be accepted and recognized, or, more importantly, expressive? After all, isn't a true artist one who dreams; one who sees the world in a different light; one who desires to present how they see and feel the world?

Each of us are unique. We will all have our unique way of creation using the Braintone Art process. However, the basic steps are as follows: First, you choose a style that you want to paint. Next, just as an artist would squeeze paint onto their palette in preparation for painting, you choose a color palette. Then, we place a non-invasive and harmless EEG device—made by NeuroSky—on your head that will be used to gather the data from your brain. Immediately following, you begin creating artwork with your mind based off your color palette coupled with your conscious and unconscious cognitive thought patterns and emotions. The resulting artwork is a direct impression of you—how you felt, how you were thinking, and how you generally interacted with the imagery on the fly. Finally, you may then have it placed to canvas and hand-stretched. It's all yours. You are an artist. Being a part of this process is commonly described as being a supernatural experience!

To give you a more intimate view of the process, this is how founding artist, Jeremiah Howell creates this art: To trigger emotional responses he supplements each session with music that inspires him or conjures memories. After a few seconds of listening he quickly lets his brain paint, creating art from thought and emotion in the digital realm of bits and bytes. During the painting session, he participates in a cycle of mental dialogue‐he creates imagery with brainwaves, then observes the outcome, then combines his first emotional responses with what is happening on the canvas in real time. True to the process of creating art, this allows Jeremiah to interact on the fly with what he is creating. This ultimately produces an artwork that is the result of inner discovery—a relationship with the work that reveals how he feels in artistic form.

This story has roots to art class back in 1993 England, when confronted with a frustration. Almost two decades later, the solution is realized.

"A long time ago, in an entry level studio art class, a fellow student said to me, "I wish I could paint ... this stuff is too difficult. Hey, would you do a painting for me?" I was honored by the request and enthusiastically produced a painting. As years of art study progressed, however, I realized that an artist does not survive by painting for friends‐my ego was no longer tickled and time and energy does not exist for so many requests. My reply became "do you know how many people ask me that?" This usually rendered a slightly disappointed response and the limitation, or lack of artistic ability on their part, aggravated me very much. Aggravation because I wanted my friends to experience the joy that comes with artist creation of a personally rendered object. Why shouldn't my friends, or anyone else, be able to execute their own artwork? This bewildering thought and personal desire to share the world of artistic creation troubled me for a long time.

Fifteen years after that entry level art class, I would revisit the perplexity of non-artist individuals who desperately wanted to create. Without realizing what my mind had stumbled upon, the solution materialized while I daydreamed through yet another boring marketing meeting while working at a magazine. On this particular morning, Braintone Art was conceived. Eureka!! I had finally envisioned a situation where anyone could be an artist ... where anyone's inspiration can be translated into art!"

We can study about the purposes of art, the evolution of the idea of art, the nature of change in the fine arts, and the development of art in the modern world. We even enroll in courses about the evolution of technology and its impact on art techniques and the means of production and its unremitting change. Technological change can also help one to become the artist and create your own imagery. Using thought enables anyone to overcome real or imagined physical constraints or limitations by bypassing the conventional hand-eye coordination required to paint. This technique simply translates the electrical energy in your cerebral cortex into art. Hopefully, this discovery, or renewing of the norm, will lead to a creativity explosion in ways we have not yet discovered, in much the same way technological advances of the past allow and cause changes well beyond the direct results of technology.

"Braintone Art is my answer to my friends' requests. It's the means through which I have introduced a system of empowerment that allows anyone who wants to create art to require only the desire to do so. The elimination of hand-eye coordination constraints is more than a trend, it marks a significant art evolution."

- Jeremiah

Why the name Braintone Art and why the butterfly logo? Found here is a detailed discussion of the events that led to the careful name and logo selection.

Why the name Braintone Art and what's up with the butterfly? A valid question.

"As a young art student, I was thankful to be tutored by a well disciplined instructor who not only encouraged, but required, that a journal be transcribed for every art piece I created. Although I no longer possess all of the pieces I created, I have the journals and can read my notes and relive my creative journey through transitional thumbnail sketches and transcriptions. For some reason, the intricate form, metamorphosis process, and delicacy of a butterfly caught my attention. Perhaps my studies in other subjects (such as biology and English) and the difficult 'birthing' process of putting thought to paper was tedious for me. I had never imagined journaling about what I wanted to execute into an art form and wondered why this step was necessary. I found the creation of art can be a similar experience to metamorphosis.

To present a variant to the actual biological process, I portrayed butterflies emerging from water and drying their delicate crinkled wings as they pumped with life. I imagined this process to happen as they climbed up steep sun-bleached stairs in the warm Athenian sun. The juxtaposition of the magnificently colored butterfly, the white stone steps, and clear blue sky emerges from a metamorphosis transformation although the butterfly lives a brief but beautiful life. The painting process felt electrical! From base unrecognizable foundations, spontaneously burst forth flashes of creativity. I imagined anyone capturing these moments from mind to canvas. How beautiful these artworks would be; like the freshly transformed butterfly."

- Jeremiah

Visually, the left and right side of a butterfly are symmetrical. Perhaps more interesting might be a discussion about how even though humans appear to be externally symmetrical, internally they are not ... this includes both the physical and the intellectual. Internally, the left and right sides of the human body are quite different. More relevant to this subject is that the brain is left/right differentiated intellectually.

A butterfly has no obvious overt relationship to the brain but can have a strong metaphorical correlation. The electrical energy firing in the brain seems to jump or fly around without any absolute recognizable order or pattern. In the same respect, a butterfly's flight path cannot be accurately predicted and you never know where it will travel or land. This is greatly dependent on outside influences such as the wind and objects in the flight path. We also cannot concretely predict where our brains will wander. For example, think about when you try to fall asleep listening to the thoughts that run through your head that seem to have unpredictable connections. They move from tangent to tangent to tangent. Our brainwave patterns and a butterfly's flight are both affected by the environment in which they operate. In summation, with both butterflies and our brains, the grace and mystery in which they operate are both beautiful and artful.

Tones are typically associated with music, however, the definition of tone states that it is an accent or inflection expressive of a mood or emotion. When we measure tones (accents and inflections) of the brain and measure the results, we can create art from these measurements.

Thus, Braintone Art.