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Brianna was recently interviewed
on Denver’s NBC 9 News about her installation piece and listed
under #15 of 5280 Magazine’s 27 reasons to love Colorado in the
summer. Awards: Museum of Fine Art Houston Curatorial Award for
Excellence in Sculpture; Cain Park Third Prize; 2009 Best Studio
Artist of the Year, Arts District on Santa Fe Drive.
How it began -- The Short Version:
While she was working on her novel one day, Brianna had a fit of
inspiration and absolutely had to paint. She got a
very large piece of wood and dug out her old paints, but couldn't find
any brushes, so she tried painting with her fingers.
Because of her intense need to paint she
didn't mind using her hands - in fact, kind of liked it - and has been painting
with them ever since.
How it began -- The Long Version:
Brianna graduated with honors from Columbine High School in 1997. That summer instead of going to college, she went on a road trip,
three days into which, her car broke down beyond repair. She got a
ride with two lovely fellows from Connecticut who were kind enough
to drive her around the country for several weeks, finally dropping
her off at her Aunt’s house in Oregon where she bought another car
and resumed her travels - mostly alone - until she ran out of money
quite a few months later.
She ended up back in Oregon to live and work. After a rainy winter
and a failed relationship, she returned to Denver to begin writing a
novel about a young girl alone on a road trip.
In the fall of 1998 Brianna went to Europe with her brother and fell in
love with Italy. She returned home to jury duty and was voted in as
foreman for a week long trial of a brutal rape. Two days after
reading the guilty verdict, a good friend of Brianna’s died. And
four months later, she watched the world watch her high school live
out its tragedy. She left town again and drove around the country
for a while until returning home for her brother’s girlfriend’s
little brother’s funeral.
In the fall of 1999 Brianna went to school where she began working
one-on-one with the chair of the English Department at the
University of Denver. But she didn’t like school and took the
spring semester off to go backpacking in Southern Patagonia in Chile
with her brother. That summer she went back to school and worked as
a pizza delivery girl to save enough money to take another month
long road trip and then spend three months in Southeast Asia.
In early 2001 Brianna began volunteering at a battered women’s shelter
and was quickly hired on as a full time women’s counselor where she
worked for the next couple of years.
In 2003 (after another failed relationship) she went to Mexico, quit
her job to write full time, began painting for the first time since
high school, discovered performance poetry, went to her first
writer’s conference and ran out of money. Brianna went back to work
as a pizza delivery girl so she would have time to paint, work on
her novel, produce a spoken word album and partake in tiny poetry
tours.
September of 2004 her father died. She retired from the poetry
scene, killed a character in her novel so she could write about
death and painted as much as she could.
In early 2005 Brianna began working at Wild Oats where she was quickly
promoted into management. Within the next year her novel was
finished but her painting had stopped.
May of 2006, Brianna noticed her writing had stopped, too. So she went
to Jamaica to clear her head, came back and quit her job at Wild
Oats with no clue what to do next. She decided Prague sounded nice
and found a program there where she could earn her TEFL (Teaching
English as a Foreign Language) certificate and finally live her
dream of getting paid to travel.
But after a wonderful summer in Prague, when she came back to Denver
to pack up her apartment and be on her way, she noticed enough
paintings were selling that the momentum had to be grabbed or lost.
So she traded in her globe-trotting dream for an equally worthy
one - got a little studio/gallery in the Santa Fe Arts District
of Denver and began painting full time.
In 2009, bronze sculptor Rik
Sargent moved into a studio next door to Brianna; her life and
her work was forever changed. At the time, Rik was working
on a 12' monument for the city of Denver and after Brianna
expressed an interest in bronze sculpting he was gracious enough
to take her under his wing. He taught her the process,
introduced her to the foundries and even let her dig her hands
into the monument he was working on. Her first bronze
piece took about six months of learning to create but then she
was off and running and created over sixty bronze sculptures in
the next six months.
In 2010 Brianna began taking her art on the road and
showing her work around the country in the Art Festival circuit,
finally combining her two great loves, travel and art.
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