Brion Poloncic

Brion Poloncic is, at times, a musician, a visual artist, and a writer. He lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska, and the three disciplines feed one another; as he told Omaha Magazine in 2017, when he stumbles off the creative wagon with drawing he gets back on with writing, and the other comes right along with it.

Music came first. Poloncic began recording in 1993, releasing his earliest work as a four-track cassette and ultimately issuing seven albums under the moniker A Tomato A Day (helps keep the tornado away), two of them on the San Francisco label Public Eyesore, including The Moon Is Green (2006), an Omaha ensemble session with cello, synthesizer, and bass. Visual work arrived in 2006, when artist Ben Krell taped a sheet of paper to the wall during a documentary shoot and told him to draw; the first piece sold, and a practice was born. Self-taught, Poloncic now produces meticulous ink-and-watercolor drawings of abstract shapes, faces, and invented glyphs. He is represented by Modern Arts Midtown in Omaha and has exhibited at Gallery 72, the Nebraska Arts Council's Fred Simon Gallery, and Project Project, whose 2023 Surface Works show came with a limited-edition Gertrude Tapes monograph collecting more than seventy drawings.

He turned to fiction in 2012. JEF Books has published both of his books: Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics (2012), prose poems one reviewer called a cross between Burroughs and Bukowski, and Psychedelic Everest (2015), a love story told as a stream-of-consciousness meditation on art and the nature of genius and madness. JEF founder Eckhard Gerdes has called him the Daniel Johnston of the literary world.

Start with Xanthous Mermaid Mechanics, his 2012 JEF debut.