Muncie artist Austin Brammer found his calling after a life-threatening car accident

William “Austin” Brammer’s days are permeated with color.

The Muncie-based acrylic pour artist spends his days filling blank white canvases with layers of primary colors and metallic accents, splattering enough paint that even his once-neutral dining room curtains are considered works of art.

But his days were not always saturated with sunshine and the colors of the rainbow. One day, in particular, changed his life forever. After the fact, Brammer was narrowly consumed by the muted undertones of depression.

April 4, 2020

Brammer was driving on Interstate 69, halfway between Muncie and Fort Wayne, Indiana, when his car flipped five times in an automobile accident along the interstate. He sustained a “multitude” of injuries: a collapsed lung, a broken sternum, a broken scapula, three broken ribs, a “completely bruised up face,” and, “most notably,” a T6 incomplete spinal burst fracture.

The spinal cord injury at the T6 vertebrae, about halfway down his abdomen, rendered Branner paralyzed. As a result of the incomplete fracture, he still maintains “preserved motor function” in his lower body but is unable to bear weight on it.

Today, almost six years to the day since the accident, Brammer reflected.

“This accident was extremely life-altering for me in a multitude of ways. I barely survived. I have my hands; I have my head. That’s stuff that I am very grateful for, and that I should not even probably have in the first place,” he said.

However, he did not always feel so lucky. Alongside his art skills, gratitude took time to develop — and was far less tangible.

The first 365 days

“The first year [post-accident], I was nowhere near as optimistic as I am now,” Brammer said. “I was not doing much of anything, really. I was just grieving…and grievance in itself doesn’t have a set time period…Everyone heals and makes their milestones of grievance at their own pace.”

His mother, Candace Brammer, said that as the middle child of the family, Austin fit the stereotype.

“When he was young, he was a strong-willed child, and I remember saying multiple times, ‘This obstin[acy] is going to come in handy someday. I don’t know how. I don’t know what [for] — it’s probably going to be for a job — but it’s going to serve you well at some point.’”

After the accident, she said she could not bear to witness the depressive personality shift in her youngest, once highly independent, son.

“It was so hard as a mom,” she said. “There’s so much more to being paralyzed than just being in a wheelchair, and I had never really thought about that too much.”

What made it especially hard, Candace said, was the timing of it all. The date of Austin’s car accident, April 4, 2020, was less than one month after the United States government declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency and enforced lockdown restrictions in March 2020, according to The National Conference of State Legislatures.

Per quarantine protocol, loved ones and visitors were not permitted into hospitals. This meant that Austin went through the earliest stages of his recovery process alone.

Austin’s older brother, Chase Brammer, said he does not remember a lot from the accident itself, having “blacked out the immense stress and pain of the whole thing,” but the bits and pieces he does remember “ranks in the top two worst days of my life.”

Growing up just two years apart from one another, the brothers had a close bond. They shared similar engineering hobbies, music tastes and even slept in bunk beds as children, which made the space between them post-accident all the more devastating for Chase.

“I was frustrated, personally, because I thought that the quality of care and the ability to communicate [within hospital networks] was as good as it was going to get, but it was not as high as I think it would have been if it wasn’t during COVID,” he said.

Switching between Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne and Rehabilitation Hospital of Indiana (RHI) in Indianapolis, Chase, Candace and the rest of Austin’s immediate family FaceTimed as often as they could, cheering him on through various therapy appointments.

But even through the computer screens, Candace’s motherly intuition told her that although Austin’s physical pain had been heavily numbed through medication on account of his “plenty” injuries, his anger — over circumstances far beyond his control — remained inconsolable.

By the time Austin was discharged from the hospital and returned to his childhood home in Muncie to live with his parents, they shared his sense of helplessness.

“We were just kind of thrown into ‘What do we do now?’ and ‘How do we help you?’” Candace remembered.

These were questions none of the Brammers had answers to — but Candace looked inward to find them. The Ball State early childhood education alumna had worked as a preschool teacher in the years prior to that. After Austin’s accident, Candace quit her job, but her nurturing character held strong as she became his primary caregiver, a role she held for three years before returning to the workforce.

During this time, the mother and son formed an ironclad bond.

“We cried together…We both had a lot of anxiety about all the newness, trying to find a new way through the world and [how] to function, but honestly, it’s been really great,” Candace said. “We definitely got a lot closer than we ever had been, because I don’t think we were as close as I was with my other kids.”

Art as therapy

Austin was 24 at the time of his accident. At that age, “He was big into independence, social life and experiencing the world the way young, 20-year-olds do,” Candace said.

That all changed in the blink of an eye, at about 60 mph.

Upon moving back into his childhood home, Austin became nearly comatose under a mixed cocktail of grief, anger and depression. Watching in real time as those emotions took over her son, Candace knew the pair could not spend their days sitting idly by.

“We have to find something to do,” she said, beginning her activity search.

As a child herself, Candace enjoyed crafting and making pencil sketches with her best friend in the early 80s, but “was never good at it,” she said. “That was me as a kid; the end results were never good, but the process was fun.”

Then came Austin’s 25th birthday. He still fondly remembers the day his parents gifted him his first, premixed, acrylic fluid art set.

“My mom said, ‘Austin, you’re gonna do this with me, because I want to do it, and I want you to do it with me too,’” he said, reciting his mother’s matter-of-fact tone in the moment.

Austin described feeling “liberated” after creating his first painting. For him, the artistic craft was far more than just “something to do,” as Candace had initially set out to find.

Instead, acrylic pour art was “something I could do again,” Austin said. “It was something that was not a spinal cord injury. It was something that wasn’t the loss that I was dealt.”

Over the last half-decade, Austin has regained his independence. While Candace said Austin “doesn’t need much help anymore,” she was happy to step in when he needed it and cultivate his craft.

“I feel very happy that I was able to help him. That’s extremely gratifying, because of how hard [recovery] was and how much [a parent] wants [their] child — even though [Austin] was grown — to enjoy life, so it’s great to watch his [creative] process and how it’s affected him,” she said.

‘Going all in’

For about two years after receiving the art set, Austin said he did acrylic fluid art for fun. It was his close friends and family who helped turn his creations into cash flow.

His grandmother’s sister was the first person to ask for a commissioned piece in late 2023. Austin said he was hesitant to take up the request at first because “the art itself is very, very abstract, and it’s very hard to necessarily replicate certain pieces or certain images, and it’s very, very difficult to have a lot of control over. There’s always an aspect of randomness to this,” he said.

Nevertheless, Austin completed the commission and remembers the customer testimonial he received afterward.

“Austin, if you don’t do something with this, I feel like you’re wasting a really, really, really good talent and a really good story,” he recalled his grandmother’s sister telling him.

The positive, motivating feedback, coupled with the end of the 2023 calendar year — a time for new year’s resolutions — posed Austin with a decision to make.

“I was determining whether or not I was going to decide to actually go all in and try to become a vendor at certain markets and events for my artwork and have my own little side gig — or if I was going to get an administrator certification in Salesforce… You can kind of tell which direction I ended up going,” he laughed.

In March 2024, Austin applied to be a vendor at Minnetrista Museums & Gardens weekly farmers markets and was later accepted.

“I love the Minnetrista. It’s a super accessible market, and I love that about it,” he said.

Through the years, as he has returned to the Minnetrista farmers markets and similar events like First Thursday boardwalks in downtown Muncie, “I just realized, ‘There’s something to be made here,’ whether it be money, a defining experience for people, [or] a powerful story,” Austin said.

His wheelchair, now an ingrained part of his story, has afforded him opportunities to connect with other disabled individuals — opportunities he recognizes he may not have if not for his car accident.

“There was a wonderful time,” Austin recalled, “where I met a family with a little girl who had spina bifida, so she was in an Ultralight wheelchair, akin to what I use.”

The family, as Austin’s anecdote went, was visiting from the Wisconsin area en route to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. The family’s daughter had done well in school and was heavily invested in art, so they made a pit stop to see the Bob Ross exhibit in Muncie, where they met up with Austin at a First Thursday event.

“I’ll do a lot of special stuff for kids if they’re interested in art, because I think it’s really important for kids to get into artwork…to encourage them to explore different mediums of expression,” he said.

Austin let the family’s daughter pick out a 3” by 3” easel painting to take home with her. In moments like those rooted in connection, “It’s not really so much about making a quick 10 bucks, or however much I sell [paintings] for. It’s about giving [customers] a memory,” he said.

‘Beauty in the absurd’

As the years have passed, Chase said his brother’s sense of creativity is nothing new. “[Austin’s] always been a creative person. I don’t think he’s had a medium to express it until this,” he said.

Austin said what draws him specifically to the acrylic pour medium is its abstract nature that reminds him of “the beauty of the absurd,” a strong parallel to the fact that he likely would never have discovered his artistic talent without his 2020 wreckage.

Although the car accident inevitably forced him to rethink and adjust, Candace said her son is still the same boy she has known and loved since his birth.

“He’s so kind and empathetic, and he was that way all his life. He was that way before his accident; the accident didn’t make him that way,” she said.

Austin shared similar thoughts about his evolution post-accident. To him, it was not so much a change in character as having to “overcome and adapt,” a standard of human existence.

“The long story short of it all is I suffered a very traumatic and tragic thing. It could always be worse, and I acknowledge that. But just like anybody else when they suffer a traumatic thing, we find ways to cope with it, and we find ways to overcome and adapt,” he said. “[Acrylic pour painting] was my first step in the direction of finding something that I can do again. It made me feel alive, and it put a smile back on my face that I hadn’t really had in a long time. I really do owe a lot of it to my mom, because she was pretty stubborn about it.”

Today, Austin’s creativity has earned him recent titles, including RoHo’s Martini Bar in Muncie’s February Artist of the Month and Savage’s Ale House’s current March Artist of the Month. Those interested in seeing his art or hearing his story firsthand can visit Austin at Minnetrista’s Saturday farmers markets or First Thursday events in downtown Muncie, both of which he is a frequent vendor at.

Contact Katherine Hill via email at katherine.hill@bsu.edu.

This article is republished as part of a collaborative content-sharing agreement between Ball State Unified Media and Indiana Public Radio, established to expand access to high-quality journalism and to better inform and serve the public through trusted, in-depth reporting.