Virginia Broersma (b. San Diego, CA), is a painter working in the Beacon Arts Building in Inglewood, CA. After completing her undergraduate degree in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Virginia lived and worked in Chicago, IL and Santa Fe, NM, before returning to the west coast.
Broersma paints both the agony and the ecstasy — vaguely human figures and fragments are rendered as though they are unfurling in delight or anguish. In vacuous pastel color fields, oil paint is applied with a bravado stroke to simulate flesh at its best and worst. Pulling colors and composition from many references — life, photographs, renaissance painting, and her own imagination — Virginia cultivates an airy, emotional atmosphere where the viewer is left to draw their own conclusions on the quality of life that these forms may enjoy.
Please click the gallery above to see a sampling of Broersma’s paintings!
Before leaving her studio, Virginia mentioned a quote by Cecily Brown that touched on her own reasons for finding painting to be the most fruitful method of artistic expression: ” “I’ve always wanted to exploit the properties that only painting has. This probably comes from starting at a time when people were so against painting and one was constantly having to justify doing it, so I always wanted to make something that could only be made in paint, and I think the properties of paint encourage this kind of mobile, kind of slippery, elusive….all these qualities where things are constantly in a state of morphing into something else.” –
Art and Dinner in Los Angeles! 