Featured Artist J. M. Brodrick

J. M. Brodrick’s paintings are both realistic and abstract at once. The artist uses dynamic brushwork and a complex palette to create figures that emerge from undefined backgrounds. Visit her website to learn more about.

 

 

I’ve been painting since early in my youth with my grandmother, a professional artist from Helsinki, Finland, and I grew up in a working artist environment. My grandmother helped shape me at an early age to express myself with painting. Her words of wisdom still guide me in my work, as if I still have her standing behind me giving advice on how to move through a passage in the painting.

 

 

At seventeen, I took to the world on my own, taking a job at an insurance company, working my way up over a thirty-seven year career, learning every detail of the business and painting in my time off and on weekends and holidays.

 

 

I tend to paint what I love, from horses to landscapes to painting portraits.

 

 

Portraits are the most challenging because the portrait has to resemble the person you are painting. With every painting, you learn something; no painting is ever a failure. You always gain skill or you learn what not to do.

 

 

These days I no longer have outside employment and I’m often painting six to ten hours a day, fulfilling commissions for subjects all over the world.

 

 

It’s a life’s vocation. It’s not work. It is what I choose to do and how I choose to spend my time.

 

 

I’m working towards merging my need for realism with the beauty of pure abstract. It’s an ongoing process and I find I’m challenging myself to keep pushing to discover new ways to apply paint. Some work out, and some are disasters – but moving forward in my work is all important to me.

 

 

This means sometimes playing one color off the other in harmony, much as a composer uses combinations of notes to form a symphony.

 

 

I love spending weeks at a time painting away in my studio.  To me there is no better way to spend your life.

 

Artist J. M. Brodrick invites you to follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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