Growing up in the deep south, Drury Bynum’s only exposure to art was watching his aunt paint Louisiana swamp scenes in her tiny kitchen studio.
Her ability to summon rich and detailed worlds by hand prompted him to begin drawing and painting on his own. His public school had no art program, so he practiced drawing faces and figures from magazines, comics, and album covers. Bynum left the south to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1988.
There, he explored the techniques of alla prima painting and drawing figures, portraits, and landscapes. He later shifted to narrative themes, using collage as a way to iterate quickly. The traditional approaches of working directly from life, married with modernist techniques of experimentation and subjective experience, were key factors in Bynum’s artistic development.
In 1997, Bynum received his Master’s Degree from Bowling Green University. His thesis exhibit—a body of large-scale works of backyard scenes featuring brides, photographers, and Baltimore row-houses—revealed a mature stylistic identity. The scenes were colorful, visually dense moments that contained enigmatic narratives that continued to appear in his work in the following years.
The technological shift happening around the internet and the sudden availability of affordable video cameras shifted Bynum’s focus onto filmmaking in the mid-2000’s. He created his own production company, Shine Creative, specializing in innovative, narrative short films for brands.