Today we’d like to introduce you to Brinda Lane-Pumphrey
Hi Brinda, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve been an artist since I was old enough to hold a crayon. My dad died when I was young and I was an only child, so I spent much of my free time as a kid drawing in my room. I guess it was a way for me to escape and fill the hole left in my heart. The need to create became a strong force in my life. Over the years I’ve experimented with many different mediums, but painting has been my true passion. I taught myself to paint landscapes and animals using oil paints when I was in middle school. I studied art and photography in college. An influential art professor, Mel Carter, nurtured the artist in me and steered me towards teaching. I will always be thankful to him.
After college I worked as a teacher but took time away from teaching to raise my children. We spent a lot of time huddled around the kitchen table with crayons or paint, making Easter eggs or valentines or even elaborate gingerbread houses. Spending this precious time with my children allowed me to experience art making through their eyes, for the pure joy of being creative. The older my children became, the more complex our artistic endeavors became. We’ve built Casa Bonita out of graham crackers, the Millennium Falcon out of gingerbread, and many other equally complex creations. They are grown up now but I still enjoy being involved in creative projects with them. Eventually I decided to return to teaching as a middle school art teacher.
In 2005, I hiked from rim to rim across the Grand Canyon. This was a life altering and deeply spiritual experience for me. I hiked out of the canyon after five days covered in dust, tired yet exhilarated, and feeling like a different person. My focus returned to painting landscapes. I felt a deep need to paint what I had experienced. But teaching art was time consuming. During the school year so much of my creative energy went into planning and trying out projects that my own art making slowed to a snail’s pace. Even so, I loved teaching art and the creative chaos that ensued when my students were excited about their projects. Former students have contacted me over the years to tell me that I helped them get through middle school and inspired them to continue their own creative journey. As a teacher it doesn’t get any better than that! Summer vacations were spent on my covered back patio, my favorite studio location, in a burst of creativity that lasted for two glorious months, fueled by a need to put what was inside me on canvas.
I retired from teaching art in May of 2024, anxious to focus my energy on painting. Now I am working on turning all these ideas that have been bottled up inside me into paintings. While I have been showing my work in galleries around the Denver Metro area since 2014, I wanted to take it up a notch and be a part of a creative community so I joined D’art 360 Gallery. I’ve already been in two group shows and will be in a four person show April 24 through May 18, 2025. The artist reception will be April 25. I also joined the Colorado Chapter of Women’s Caucus for the Arts.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I would describe it as a long and winding road. It’s taken me a long time to home in on a style I am happy to call my own. I have a tendency to get diverted, so over the years I skipped from one medium to the next, but I always circled back to painting. For the last decade I’ve pushed myself to stay focused on painting. I’m excited about the goal of my current series: expressing the passage of time in paintings. I love working with both acrylic and oil paints for different reasons, so I can’t seem to give up either one. I am using acrylics on my current series but every once in a while I feel the urge to get my oil paints out. Because of the nature of the mediums, my paintings look very different depending on the paint I use. But there are similarities in my use of color and in the subjects I paint.
The other thing that has been challenging for me is finding my audience. I don’t know much about “marketing” and it takes time away from making art so I struggle with that aspect of being an artist. I have a website and an Instagram where I post in progress and finished paintings, exhibit announcements, as well as process videos. I guess I will always be a teacher in one way or another.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Right now I am primarily focused on an acrylic series that aims to capture the lingering traces of time in the natural world–echoes of the past so to speak. I overlap images of nature in a way that makes them look like they are fading into the past; a flower opens but then it is only there a short time, an animal might wander through the landscape but moves on. I use transparency and black outlining, sometimes giving it a stained glass look. I’ve been working through this idea for sometime, and, while the paintings are still evolving, the idea of subjects fading into their surroundings is a common thread that runs through them. My inspiration came from an abstract landscape workshop with Christian Dore early in 2020. The ideas from that workshop simmered in my brain for several years until suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. My paintings don’t really resemble Christian’s paintings but I can see his inspiration in them.
My oil paintings are primarily realistic landscapes and close ups of flowers with rich colors and fluid lines. I like to describe my landscapes as intimate, because I generally paint compositions that put the viewer in the landscape, the way it looks when I am hiking, rather than far away sweeping views. I use the photos I take on hikes as a reference. Though I often bring watercolors with me on hikes to make small paintings, my oil paintings are done in my studio. During the summer when my flowers are blooming I sometimes feel inspired to change direction and paint flowers. My oil paintings are done in an alla prima style, which means wet-on-wet, though I don’t finish my larger paintings in a single sitting, instead focusing on sections.
Some things that set my paintings apart from others are composition and color. My landscape compositions are frequently cropped in tightly which adds an intimate feel. Traditionally landscapes are painted in a rectangular format, but I love painting landscapes in a square format or a long narrow format which allows me to focus on a specific part of the landscape. The colors I use are slightly exaggerated, warmer and more intense. The impressionists noticed that shadows are not just darker but are cooler and highlights are not just lighter but warmer. I use this theory in my own work. I particularly enjoy painting slot canyons because of the rich colors, the shadows and highlights, and the flowing lines that run through them. Hiking in a slot canyon is like nothing else so I try to capture the way it feels.
I have made quite a few paintings of the Grand Canyon. After my initial rim to rim hike, I feel a need to return again and again, most recently last August for a brutally hot five-day backpacking hike down South Kaibab Trail and then up Bright Angel Trail. I’ve also fallen in love with the unique landscapes and desert colors in Utah. National parks and monuments are a precious gift to the people of our country and people around the world, and have become the subjects of many of my paintings. For the sake of future generations, I hope my paintings will make others appreciate and want to protect these wild spaces from mining and development. On my first hike in the Grand Canyon we kept seeing dragonflies, at one point a dragonfly seemed to lead us back to the trail after taking a wrong turn. Since that trip dragonflies have been special to me. If you search for it there is a tiny dragonfly hidden in each of my paintings.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
You can follow my Instagram @brindalane.art to keep up with what I am working on, and when and where I will have my work on display. To see more of my work, please visit my website: https://www.brindalane.com. You can contact me there if you are interested in a particular painting or a commission. I love working with clients to make paintings of places or subjects that are special to them. If you are with a gallery, a business, or an organization that exhibits art I would be thrilled to hear from you. The artist reception for my upcoming semi-solo show at D’art 360 Gallery will be on April 25. In addition to my paintings there will be work by three other artists, Marilee Childs, Skye Barker Maa, and Tierra Lalk. I will be posting more information about the show on my social media when it gets closer. Please join us for a fun evening of art and refreshments or visit the gallery between April 24 and May 18! D’art 360 Gallery is open on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.brindalane.com
- Instagram: @Brindalane.art
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brindalane.art/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@brindalanepumphreyart
- Other: Print on demand site: https://pixels.com/profiles/brinda-lane-pumphrey
