Brittany R. Gilbert
Brittany Gilbert grew up in North Kingstown, Rhode Island and attended North Kingstown High School. Her love for art started at an early age and she has experimented with various mediums, but her heart has always led her back to oil painting. In 2012 she graduated with honors from Union College in Schenectady, NY with a B.A. in Studio Art, with minors in Art History and French. During her junior year at college, she was awarded the Beyond the Gates Grant to study plein air painting in the summer of 2011. This allowed her to take a workshop in Buonconvento, Italy after her term abroad in Florence, as well as, an additional workshop in Sag Harbor, NY. After returning to Union College, she had a solo exhibition of work from the summer titled Landscape Impressions: Chasing the Light. Her senior exhibition of landscape paintings titled Wide Open Spaces was held in the spring of 2012. During the summer of 2012, she traveled to the Canadian Rockies and later visited Ireland to participate in the Art in the Open Festival (largest plein air festival in Europe) where her painting titled “Reflections” was “Highly Commended.” Seeking a new landscape to paint, Brittany moved to Colorado in May of 2013. She lived and worked at the 4UR Ranch in Creede, Colorado before moving to Boulder. At the 2014 Colorado Plein Air Festival, her painting “Soft Light” received an honorable mention in the emerging artist category. In 2015 she was included in Southwest Art magazine’s “21 under 31” article in the September issue. At the end
of 2015, she relocated back to New England. In 2015 and 2016 she was accepted into PAAC’s Annual National Juried Exhibition and Sale at Mary Williams Fine Art in Boulder. Currently she is a Masters in Fine Art Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
First-hand experience. Time. Change. Familiarity. These four elements are essential to my practice as a painter. Through sequential landscape painting, I aim to explore these elements. Changes in the appearance of our surroundings due to light, season, climate and temperature have always fascinated me. But, is time represented in painting possible? In graduate school I have rigorously committed to working strictly from life. Instead of trying to work around the changes I noticed, I aim to embrace them. Through long painting sessions of direct observation, I experience, engage and react to the changes that have always fascinated me. Repetition and series allow me to capture immediate impressions, yet still arrive at a fuller understanding of the space through multiple images. The shapes, color and sense of depth are constantly changing; light and weather conditions can conceal and reveal forms. The work becomes not only a record of the space itself, but also of my fluctuating perceptions. What do I become the most interested in when I do not have time to capture everything? How does my focus or interests change over time? What does it mean to 
be familiar with a subject or a space? The more time I spend (days, weeks, months) translating the same scene with paint, the more I see and the more the possibilities of the space open up to me as an artist. Outside there is so much information and so many constantly changing variables that are out of my control. What does it mean to engage with how these observations add to my understanding and attune my senses to the nuances of the scene? Being in the landscape, painting in this manner, forces me to address directly what is imminently present. Each moment vying for attention or nestling back into obscurity. Each moment a piece in a greater puzzle.
