Visit a farmer’s market and you’ll find an art gallery unto itself, filled with the beautiful colors of fresh fruits and vegetables. . . drop by Jennie Brigham’s website and you’ll see the same thing—bright and bold oil paintings of delectable fruit.
Currently living in Colorado, Jennie has focused on painting for the past eight years. Her subjects are primarily still lifes, with some human and animal subjects mixed in, but I was most drawn to her stunning oil paintings of fruit.
Jennie does two things in her artwork that I really love. First, she places the subject extremely close to the viewer, and second, she uses bright, unconventional color combinations. The painting below is a great example of these brighter- and bigger-than-life techniques.
Obviously, the visual size of the blueberries gives them much more emphasis than normal, and allows the viewer to discover all of that delicious, painterly texture.
Jennie’s background is a striking pink, making the blue of the blueberries really pop, and both subject and background capture the light perfectly which only adds to the dazzling colors.
Jennie’s enlarged subjects are also strategically cropped by her paintings’ borders, which allows her to emphasize a focal point.
The “border cropping” technique shown above also adds to the abstract nature of the whole painting. You really start to notice the positive and negative shapes created by the foreground subjects and the simple, bright background.
I also love how the strawberry in the middle is placed so the leaves become the heart of the painting, rather than the bright fleshy skin—and of course, that deliberate arrangement is one hallmark of Jennie’s work.
To give another example, in this last painting there are three pears, delicately placed against each other with their stems dancing above. . . perfectly arranged to draw your eyes up and down, again and again, as the light dazzles off of their skin.
If you’d like too see more of Jennie Brigham’s bright, fresh oil paintings, please visit her website at www.jenniejbrigham.com.
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