In-Focus: Charlotte Brisland

IN FOCUS: charlotte brisland 

Charlotte Brisland is a Contemporary Painter, graduated from the Royal College of Art in painting. Brisland has exhibited internationally and her paintings appear in museums and private collections. Awards include Jackson's painting prize 2018 (Jopp2018) and most recently won first prize in the Beep Painting Prize 2024. The paintings have been featured in contemporary art publications, Floorr magazine, Create and Friend of the artist.

'My paintings centre on spaces I am inventing of stillness and loneliness. Loneliness for me happens in layers and in different contexts, sometimes it’s a choice, or a deeper sense of disconnect and sometimes it’s a desire to be alone, more to do with solitude. In the roles I have lived as daughter, sister, friend, student, mother, lecturer, wife, in all these, loneliness has been there in some way. My source material comes from films, online virtual maps and photographs which I will have in front of me when building up drawings which will become larger paintings.

The images I choose of leafy suburbs grown around the construction of nuclear weapons, picture postcard fields and hedgerow which disguise battle grounds, spaces of time travel and folkloric landscapes described through word of mouth and ancient matriarchal memory. The colour palette is something which pulls out things I want the painting to lean into, or something I just want to play with.

It is all a discovery, and it all returns to this place of quiet contemplation, exploring loneliness from every angle. It comes from a quiet room, a room where I go to be alone and make paintings which I hope connect to other people.' — CHARLOTTE BRISLAND

Studio: Ceredigion, Wales.