Photo by Anthony Camera
 

Brianna and the only paint brush she owns,
used for preparing wood panels.

Biography

Brianna is a working artist in the Santa Fe Arts District of Denver, Colorado.  She also curates for Aviano in Denver's Golden Triangle Arts District and Citizen Pictures on 2800 Speer Blvd.

After painting in the kitchen for several years, Brianna launched her career in December 2006 when she signed a lease for a studio inside Core New Art Space on 9th and Santa Fe.

How it began -- The Short Version:

In the middle of trying to write a novel, Brianna had a fit of inspiration one day and absolutely had to paint.  She got a very large piece of wood, dug out her old paints, but couldn't find any brushes.  Due to the severity of the need to paint she didn't mind, and in fact, kind of liked it and has been painting with her hands ever since.

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 off the spring semester to go backpacking in Southern Patagonia of 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 has been painting full time ever since.