A different kind of artist
Zach Branham was once on the road to rock stardom.
At the end of his freshman year at Franklin, the musically-gifted Branham received a call from a friend who was putting together a new band. For the next four and a half months, he traveled the Midwest and the East Coast as a guitarist and keyboardist for Shindig, an indie rock group that had just signed a $55,000 record deal.
Growing up with a studio musician father meant Branham spent his childhood immersed in the world of music. It is something that comes easily to him, he said, his most natural form of expression. But Branham’s short stint as a paid musician left him homesick and bitter. He came back from touring and let his guitar gather dust for three months.
“[While] I was on the road I was home maybe five days. I missed my girlfriend, I missed my family, and it wasn’t me... It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be,” Branham explained. “But I know that I am an artist.”
Branham still remembers his band experience fondly as an opportunity to perform while seeing the country from the unique perspective of a fledgling rock star, but his time away meant he was forced to leave college for a semester.
When he returned to school the following winter, Branham, who began college as an aspiring lawyer, branched out and discovered a passion for a different kind of art - photography and digital art. These days, he is excitedly beginning to work with an old Polaroid land camera, one of the originals that fold out, accordion-style.
Now, Branham wants to be a photographer.
He even hopes to include his arts-inclined father in his future photography business. Branham’s entire family has given him a deep understanding of and appreciation for fine arts. He credits both his father and mother, a sociology professor, for continually challenging him to express his feelings using words, design and music.
Now he is bringing this same appreciation to future art students.
Branham will graduate this December after finishing both his studio art and history majors, but he will leave behind a new fine arts committee, a student-led organization with a mission, Branham said, to promote art both in the community and in the personal lives of students.
“Art says endless amounts about culture and about personality and about nationality. The arts are these identifiers that are so often cast aside as nothing more than entertainment.”
Though he will be gone before the new group realizes its potential, he wants future students to learn from both his successes and his failures.
“I want to make my artwork look good,” he says. “I want to spend time getting a fine arts community going, even if I’m not going to see the benefits of it. I still want to do it because it needs to be done.”
Branham recognizes the arts as more than mere fun and games; he sees them as a form of expression. The new fine arts club will take this point of view and turn it into a beneficial tool for young students interested in art, design or music as they enter college.
“I really focused more on the artistic lifestyle of living broke and living wild,” Branham says of his former rock star philosophy. “Now I’m realizing as I’m almost out of college I’ve got these awesome facilities. I’ve got all this stuff at my fingertips, and it’s almost gone.”
