Jamie Brunson: meditation and tranquility
Jamie Brunson’s paintings aren’t just beautiful, they’re healing. Deeply influenced by her long-time practice of Kundalini meditation, Jamie Brunson translates perceptual and sensory experiences into reductive visual language, using color, line, rhythm and spatial depth.. Our team at Turner Carroll Gallery hope Brunson’s work brings some peace and tranquility to your busy holiday season!
Brunson was born and raised in California, but spent a number of influential childhood years in Japan when her father was stationed there. This had a large influence on her artistic voice, as the artist recounts:
“Living outside of American popular culture, and being exposed at a young age to Japanese refined, nature-based aesthetics, was a powerful formative experience.”
Later, Brunson studied painting at California College of the Arts before earning an MFA in painting from Mills College in 1983. After many years living and working in the Bay Area, Brunson developed a distinctive visual voice combining formal composition with meditative sensibility.
Working with oil paint, alkyd medium, refined beeswax and vintage paper collage, Brunson uses the physical qualities of her mediums improvisationally to render observations of nature, architecture and atmospheric phenomena into formal abstraction. Brunson uses the physical qualities of her mediums in an improvisational process which renders perceptions in formal abstraction. Brunson’s process includes layering bands of color and working wet into wet to add and subtract until she reaches compositions that evoke both internal states and the external landscape and shifting atmosphere.
Jamie Brunson in her Santa Fe studio
After relocating to Northern New Mexico in 2014, the landscape of the region began to inform her paintings, introducing a sense of expansiveness and quiet presence rooted in the high desert environment. Brunson is noticeably inspired by the dramatic and vast horizon, the scale of the blue sky, the land’s subtle color and texture variation, and the historic architecture that is so special to the Southwest.
Jamie Brunson’s work is held in important public and private collections including the San Jose Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum of Sacramento, the di Rosa Art Preserve, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and in the collection of the U.S. Embassy in Doha, Qatar, among others. She balances studio practice with teaching, writing, curatorial work, and community engagement. We can all relate to the human desire that Brunson’s work is born of; painting is an exercise in staying present in the unfolding moment and working collaboratively with the sensations of the world around you.
After relocating to Northern New Mexico in 2014, the landscape of the region began to inform her paintings, introducing a sense of expansiveness and quiet presence rooted in the high desert environment. Brunson is noticeably inspired by the dramatic and vast horizon, the scale of the blue sky, the land’s subtle color and texture variation, and the historic architecture that is so special to the Southwest.
Author: Sophie Carroll