Jamie Brunson’s paintings aren’t just beautiful, they’re healing. Deeply influenced by her long-time practice of Kundalini meditation, she aims to translate perceptual and sensory experiences from meditation into a “visual language” of color, line, rhythm and spatial depth.

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.

Her work often evokes natural, architectural, and atmospheric materials, at times in oil paint and at others in vintage paper collages, alkyd medium, or refined beeswax. 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.