Interview with artist Brandi Twilley

Christmas Tree 32” by 56” oil on canvas 2015


                  Could you recall every part of your childhood home? What if all you had to remember the place you came from by was your memory? Could you piece it all together, a space lost in flames? In 'The Living Room', a series shaped around the loss of her family abode as a teenager in a house fire, Brandi Twilley does the seemingly impossible work of recollecting from memory the details of that space. The way the television light spilled out onto the floor, drawers half shut, video cassettes under a Christmas tree and the flames that would take it all away. Almost. If we can still remember what is lost does it somehow survive? A mental photo album, perhaps the kind all of our minds keep in one way or another, but one we rarely need to use in this way. Creating out of necessity is a sacred and hard work, and these pieces are up to that task.  Recollection, recreation, and living on, even if only in memory.


AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Brandi: Some of my earliest memories are of making drawings when I was very small. I really feel like there isn’t a period in my life when making art-work wasn’t a part of it. When I first began painting though was a significant memorable time. I started painting when I was 15. I worked large right away. Everything about painting was exciting to me at that time. I made copies after the artists that I admired such as Titian and Picasso. I painted things from my dreams and I made renaissance style paintings that are humorous to me now. I painted portraits of my family. I was very uninhibited in a way that is hard for me to imagine now. From that time on I wanted to spend as much time painting as possible for as long as possible.


AHC: Could you talk some about your overall process, themes & inspirations?

Brandi: For the living room series and the work I am making right now I am painting things that I remember that I have little or no record of. I am still making paintings of the house I grew up in that burned down when I was 16. I am forced to work from memory and from imagination to piece things together. At first this process seemed impossible, especially since I am more used to working from life and from photos,-a process which seems so straight forward and easy now. I have felt really lost trying to figure out such things as the shape of a chair I remember or just which way a shadow should fall. I have discovered that similar to working from life where I can compare a painting to physical reality for matching colors and making accurate forms-when working from memory I can follow what aligns with what feels right. The lasting impressions of the way that light streams in from a window that I experienced repeatedly in the years I lived in the space are their own form of truth that I can strive for. I can’t get every thing to be right in a technical accuracy type of way but I can make the painting really feel like what I experienced. When that does happen in the painting it is intense for me since I feel like I have really pulled an image that has for so long been a vague subconscious place that I visit in an occasional dream into the actual world. It is a slow process making the paintings. When I come in to the studio after a few days away I am anxious and overwhelmed and have no idea where to jump in, since the images are complicated and unplanned. I try to find one thing to change and then from there I carefully re-enter the painting.
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Living Room: Night 32” by 56” oil on canvas 2015

AHC: Who are some of your artistic influences? Is there anyone outside of the art world whose work has impacted your own, or who just generally inspire you, writers, filmmakers, musicians etc? 


Brandi: I like David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick.  I grew up watching a lot of horror and sci-fi movies. I do take inspiration from film and the process of acting. For a while I was watching episodes of Inside the Actor’s Studio and I found it inspiring the lengths that actors go to become their characters. The way they draw on their own experience or in the case of method actors become their character and live in their shoes as much as they can is fascinating. I take a good deal of inspiration from tabloids, news shows like Dateline Mystery, and the events and stories that play out in politics and in the lives of celebrities. I like learning about the processes that writers or dancers go through to make what they make. I find it refreshing and I often feel like I can only handle taking in so much visual art related content.

Some of my painting influences are Degas, Titian, Goya, Velasquez, Blue Period Picasso, and Frida Kahlo. Lately contemporary painters I like are Nicole Eisenman, Josephine Halvorsen, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.


AHC: Your series The Living Room is an incredibly personal body of work, packed with loss and memory-mourning, was the creative process around this series at all cathartic for you, did it carry with it a type of closure once the work was done?

Brandi: Yes, definitely. The Living Room series was something I felt like I had no choice in making. I absolutely had to make these paintings. I went through a great deal emotionally and painting wise in order to make them. Each time I finished one of the paintings in the series I felt a bit of relief to have released the image into the physical world and be free of it and also to preserve it. When the whole series was done I felt good but also a bit sad that ultimately I would be leaving this place forever. Since I have had some space from it though I feel good to have closed that door.

The Bed  32” by 56” oil on canvas 2015


AHC: What was the most difficult piece for you to create, technically and conceptually? 

Brandi: The most difficult piece to create was “Living Room-Night.” I painted two versions of it before I painted the one that worked out. It is a good thing I didn’t realize at the time that those paintings would end up as rejects, because I would have felt too demoralized to keep going. It was hard to contrive what television light does and to juggle all that I wanted to happen in the painting. The ones that didn’t work out kept getting darker to the point that they went totally black.

AHC: What is the first work of art you encountered that took your breath away? 

Brandi: That would have to be Picasso’s “The Old Fisherman.” I saw it when I was 11 and realizing that Picasso painted it when he was 13, it blew my mind. I saw it in a book, which I still possess, that I checked out from my local library. The painting is pretty amazing even aside from the fact of his age.  It really turned my world upside down, because I didn’t realize that some one so close to my age could paint like that-granted Picasso was unusual, a prodigy. I decided at that moment that I would put away my Crayola colored pencils and my set of markers that I made drawings with, and was determined to learn to paint and draw representationally. I worked from life painting and drawing my self and my family, hoping to catch up to Picasso.
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 My Studio in July with fire paintings in progress


AHC: Are there times when you become blocked creatively? What do you do to rekindle inspiration?

Brandi: The best thing I have found is to stop painting and just make drawings. It’s a much easier way to be lost. I feel much more free making them. The relationship I have with drawing is very pure. I just enjoy it and love it and I let myself draw whatever I need or want to make and it’s not so much of an investment. I have deep scars from paintings that haven’t worked out, but drawings just go in the trash and I never think about them again. It is also good to just take a break altogether. I think that it helps to renew the desire to make things.


AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Brandi: I may be having a show with my younger sister, Rebecca, at Hood Gallery, in Bushwick, in March or April. My younger sister makes paintings and drawings of fantasy characters like dragons and warrior princesses. This would only be her second show ever. I will likely show a recent portrait of Rebecca and some drawings from memory of her as a child.

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All images © Brandi Twilley (courtesy of the artist)


For more visit branditwilley.com/