oil and water color of Belize

Caye Caulker, Belize, Central America, email: pamelabraun@yahoo.com

Pamela Braun originally from San Antonio, Texas motivated by the prodigious rainforest environment immigrated to Belize in 1990 to paint natural spaces that are being extinguished in the Americas. The universality of her art is rooted in nature. Believing that when art is true, it is one with nature, the secret of primitive art.

Guillermo Gutierrez Nieto author of Belize Art Panorama of the Arts in Belize , Ediciones Pleamar, Mex,2001 says about Pamela,

" Her principal expression medium is painting utilizing mostly oil, she also works with mixed materials and with huge spaces painting murals.  

A quick look to her works could suggest to us only reproductions of something obvious in this country.  Nevertheless, if we watching them with detail, we can discover a thorough technical process which ends in a perennial vividness reflected in the natural elements that she integrates.

The mixed works of Pamela Braun have implicit one of the dilemma that most of the artists affront, the social compromise.  In that sense, through the pieces of old newspapers , Braun invokes the deep difference between the natural harmony and the villainess of some human acts.  Maybe for this reason, the works are a kind of call toward the improvement of our spiritual health if we look again to the nature."

Andrew Steinhauer art critic and editor of the Belize Times says,

"Pamela Brauns' paintings are passionate love affairs with the act of painting. Whatever direction her iconography takes, Brauns' multifaceted technical finesse makes her Belize's "painters' painter."  Her 'touch' covers the waterfront, from wispy and delicate to bombastic and overbearing at the same time the mood of her work shifts from unbridled emotionalism to pensive contemplation of semiotic incongruities to wry double entendres.

A series of still life fruit studies have their double entrendre roots in Georgia O'keefe and Judy Chicago's floral studies, which were debatably not about flowers at all.  likewise there might be more than fruit in those paintings content.

Braun also uses mixed media, painting and attached objects to investigate semiotic dichotomies between image and signifier.

Her early expressionistic-metaphysical paintings. through no matter which style is focused on, there is one cohesive common denominator in her work and that is her unbaised joy in the painting process.  Pamela Braun's paintings are passionate love affairs with the act of painting.  Her figurative work displays a brazen relish in the tactility of paint, the vibrancy of color and the emotional expression that can be achieved within the paint medium.

Braun's images are rendered in a highly physical, gestural style.  she's not afraid to distort the figure and go to proportional extremes in her quest to capture something as mercurial as the human psyche on the verge of neurosis on canvas. 

Pamela has a sensitivity and feel for the physicality of paint that is head and shoulders above the rest.  She has a light hearted, highly nuanced touch that is counter pointed by a meticulous intellect.  Her work is both whimsical and serious simultaneously.  There is a tactility to her pieces that raise it above the parameters of conventional still-life. 

Some of her work is bland, tenaciously traditional; while other pieces are dizzying displays of visual-verbal double entendres. When Braun lets it all hang out, the conceptual vigor of her paintings are in a league of their own.  There are no limits to her technical skills. Braun is the glaze master par excellence. She slings paint around the canvas with the athletic finesse that Venus Williams bops the ball around the tennis court. Both have deadly accuracy and a delicately muscular style. "