Jessica Brilli

I’ve posted so many thoughts and artists since our visit from Carlos San Millan that you would be reasonable to think I was about finished. This may be difficult to believe, but I still have more to post. Way, way more to post.

Many of you who were in the workshops said that you felt like you were presented with an enormous amount of information, but were unable to practice implementing the ideas in just two fast days. Many more of you were disappointed to miss the workshops entirely, since spaces sold out in the first hour of the announcement! For the people who did not have sufficient time to practice, and for the people who were not able to attend, I have designed a Thursday class series just for you: Drawing & Painting the Effects of Light. This is an offshoot inspired by our wonderful visiting artist from Spain.

Drawing & Painting the Effects of Light is not a realism class, and can be implemented in observational and abstract works alike, so artists of all media and genres are invited to sign up. The only requirement is that you have experience working in your chosen media, and foundational knowledge in whatever steps you use to create your artwork, enough so that we have something to attach the technical theories to.

More about that later. For now, please enjoy another one of Carlos San Millan’s favorite artists: Jessica Brilli. These are images that he chose for his private inspiration file.

Jessica Brilli

From her website:

Jessica Brilli (Sayville, NY 1977) has been drawing and painting since her childhood. Working in a style that encompasses American realism and 20th century graphic design aesthetics, Brilli’s paintings reveal the beauty in everyday scenes and objects.

Inspired by Kodachrome slides and generations-old photographs gathered from yard sales and basements across America, Brilli brings a contemporary eye to subjects often overlooked or forgotten. She sees her paintings as a way of giving renewed life to images that haven’t been seen in decades. Having had no direct experience with the images, the process of painting them takes on a different dimension for Brilli; like borrowing memories and elaborating, editing, or directing stories that intersect the knowledge and assumptions of two people who are strangers to each other.

This painting has been so boldly abstracted by flattened shapes, the figures look almost like little remnants on top of a streamlined composition, but take them away, and the painting falls down. Those little people, they’re useful remnants.