After a brutal beating a year ago, Git Hagan returns to art, life.

This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of one godawful-bad night for musician and artist Jeff “Git” Hagan. On March 5, 2008, Hagan was hanging out with a friend at the News Room on Broadway. Hagan ended the night being beaten within an inch of his life by two men at the bar. I posted the police report at the time. Hagan spent the next two months in a coma, followed by months of therapy, relearning how to walk, how to talk and how to make art and music.

“I had buddha guide me through it,” Hagan said when I met with him yesterday at the Brick. Tonight, the venue will display more than 30 of his paintings, some made before and some made since his injury, all for sale. At the time of his injury, Hagan had been preparing to show paintings at the Brick. Tonight’s show is what that opening would have been — and then some.

“At least I didn’t lose my creative ability. At least, hopefully I didn’t,” he said, self-effacingly.

The title of his show, “It Sounded Like a Train,” holds several meanings.

“I dreamed a lot about tornadoes as a kid. In the dream world, tornadoes signify change and chaos,” he told me. Standing next to the aptly named “Traumatic Brain Injury,” a dark, heavily textured canvas crawling with strands of painted glue, Hagan described how the strands represented the hemorrhaging veins in his brain. “When I started to regain consciousness, there was pounding in my head. My brain was swollen, and it sounded like a train, like a tornado.”

Some of the paintings are informed by the death of his fiancee in 2004 — also a period of chaos for Hagan.

Despite these traumatic events, there’s a solid note of playfulness throughout his work. He’s got a fondness for naming paintings after his favorite songs, such as “In Dreams I Walk with You,” named for the Roy Orbison song, and “Blue On Blue,” after Bobby Vinton. Other works are inspired by Buddhism, Jackson Pollock, Paul Klee and Joan Miro. In fact, one of his Miro-influenced works, “Scatter Brain,” is one of the happier-looking paintings you’re likely to see about head trauma.

We grabbed a seat at the bar and looked at his paintings crowding the north wall. “Damn, I got a lot of shit,” he said.

The opening begins tonight at 7. Hagan asks those who stop by to bring a can of food for Harvesters.