Pamela Braun exhibits at Image Factory
She’s been around a good while now and Patrick Jones took a trip to the Image factory to see her take on Belize.
Her name is Pamela Braun…. and these images are the outward expression of her innermost thoughts – in short, life through the eyes of “The Painter”.
Pamela “The Painter” Braun
“A lot of the fruits and vegetables speak about the table culture of Belize where I am at this particular time in my life, especially the coconut. The metamorphosis that the coconut goes through from the shell to water to the milk to the jelly, even eating the jelly you can eat with a spoon. I like to talk about things, speak about things in my work that are ordinary things but at the same time extraordinary in spirit.”
The Painter has over the years, somehow managed to incorporate that extraordinary spirit with her own. Her nature scenes are her signature as is her love for the look of fruits and vegetables in oil on canvass. This is only Braun’s second exhibition in six years and the thirty five pieces that are on display span roughly that period. The exhibition entitled “A Place Without A Mirror” gives a rare but impressive peek into her world.
Pamela “The Painter” Braun
“What that really implies is that I’m not looking at myself in a mirror, I’m looking to nature as the mirror for myself because you know, we all want to know, or have some meaning in our life and often times that’s difficult. We’re busy working; we’re busy struggling to survive each day.”
Braun says she has had the natural ability to paint from the time she was growing up in Texas. But her hobby had to a take back seat for a while – just long enough for her to raise two children. Now that that’s out of the way, she has decided to plunge head first back into the colorful world of art.
Pamela “The Painter” Braun
“I think the message that I want to get across is that we are so connected to nature and to our environment. In my search for some meaning that makes life meaningful for me I find that in nature, there’s a male and female everything in nature it?s so much like ourselves and we also have some many varieties of color that it is like us, it is like us as human beings.
You know there’s a lot of semiology with the colors especially the red and green, the combination of those two and when you are out in the bush and you’re watching color and you see just this immense field of green. I mean if you’re really looking all of a sudden you see a little red dot here, and a little red dot here and a little yellow dot here.”
And it is these little dots that Braun connects so stunningly to present these eye catching delights. Each is dear to her heart but this depiction of a Belizean icon is the one that stand out above the rest, because she says, it?s packed with symbols.
Pamala “The Painter” Braun
“The painting that I most like would be I guess “Lauren” painting. Because I could suppose create an image beyond the ordinary mundane life that we sometimes get caught up in and because she is recognizable and because when people see the painting they smile. So I love that creation because it?s a happiness that, you know, when a person feels a piece of your work, you feel like you have succeeded somehow and everyone’s response to that painting has just been exceptional. So I feel really happy about that painting.”
And you too should feel good about what you see when you stop by the Image Factory to check out the works of Pamela “The Painter” Braun. Patrick Jones, for News Five.
The exhibition runs through April third.
