Artist Statement

Hello, and thank you so much for visiting my website and wanting to learn more about me and my work.

Painting for me has always been about escapism: diving deep within to dissect emotions and reinterpret them on the canvas. It's a way of getting to know myself better without outside voices. Entering another world and getting lost in it, and creating a calm with color palettes and movement that interpret the multi-layered emotional landscape we carry in our human experiences.

When I was six, my parents adopted a baby who was emotionally disturbed. With that, came a drastic shift in my living environment that brought chaos, destruction, and very blurred lines of morality.

Painting is what has always kept me grounded. Taking classes growing up created a space where I could find quiet and alone time. It allowed me to hear my own thoughts and process the chaos and transform the dark layers of emotions into something visually beautiful. It allowed me to dive into research about other artists and imagine life differently, which became my compass in life. I think that is why I draw on my classical training and what has morphed into something more modern… I’m always straddling these two versions of my life: what life used to look like and the version I’ve created—the bits of chaos and trauma balanced by a calmness.

So much of my work reflects multi-faceted layers of grief. Of course the loss of innocence and aspects of childhood with my upbringing holds a sense of grief, but also when I was 26 my husband and I lost our daughter during my pregnancy in a very traumatic series of events, and that sense of grief caused me to stop painting for years afterwards. I had to redefine how I wanted to enter back into life. But finally picking up a paintbrush again is what guided me back to a place of grounded-ness. 

An ebb and flow, and a peeling back of layers. My abstract work is a mirrored representation of that emotional landscape. At various stages in life, we cover up our flaws, we peel back wounds, we grieve loss, and we gain more layers through growth and evolution. 

My paintings are always about seeking a calm and beauty amidst the layered chaos and pain. It’s a dichotomy in humans that coexists even if someone doesn’t want to acknowledge it.

Our underlying sadness can be our most endearing aspect. The layers in my paintings reflect the vulnerability of humans, revealing beautiful little moments in the folds and cracks of paint and wax.

There are usually two types of reactions when looking into these emotional mirrors. You can see yourself and your pain reflected in a way that opens you up to the beauty of those moments—maybe you feel seen; or you might be defensive and guarded because of what is being reflected back to you. This makes the interaction with these pieces a different experience for each individual. In some way, my paintings act as a vulnerability test.

A big part of my process is painting over older work. I give a certain amount of time for my paintings to sell before I move on to the next exploration and paint over what doesn't sell from previous collections. In this way, my paintings transform similarly to the human experience, that nothing is finite and as we evolve, those past layers are still a part of us. These deep layers are what make the undertones more interesting as they evolve, and they encourage me to experiment with new color matching palettes that are sometimes a little less traditional.

Every piece that I create is uniquely it’s own story. They are a reflection of what we all experience in life either as small moments or big moments from our memories, and my hope is that you can see a part of your own story in the make up too. 

I hope that my art hanging on your walls serves as a lovely reminder of how it’s the balance of the light and dark that make up what’s beautiful, and that it can be a reminder of some moment in your life that stands out as a strong memory when all the senses were activated, and that the piece you pick out is a physical reminder of that moment for you. 

Biography

Brie Walter studied fine art at Cal State University of Los Angeles and abroad at Palazzo Rucellai International Studies Institute in Florence, Italy. 

You can see some of her work in the set design of The Morning Show, season 2, being released on AppleTV in the fall of 2021.

Her last art exhibit was part of the "Art in Bloom" series held in March 2020 at Creative Arts Group in Sierra Madre, California.

She is a California native, and resides in Los Angeles with her husband, who is a music composer for film and TV, and they have one son. 

Exhibits/Gallery Work:

2020-2021: I had work exclusively available with The Poppy Society online art gallery.