An international, New York City based artist, Brigid McGivern is committed to exploring the inherent properties, color, and luminosity of form in works that move seamlessly between approaches. From naturalist abstraction and neo-expressionist narrative, this artist has created an oeuvre that is compelling in its diversity. McGivern’s primary focus is a unique approach to painting, utilizing signature mixed media methods. With an extensive array of styles and techniques within her art, her aesthetic is vast but always grounded in mood, response, and the physicality of her materials.

Inspired by the natural world, she infuses her works with a spirit of harmony and balance, with a distinctive and hypnotic edge. For the past decade, McGivern’s creative focus has been an approach to abstraction that blends color and powerful form to produce a potent visual narrative. She begins each piece by first drawing something organic, forming images based on her photographs. Her compositions can capture movement, texture, and energy, as well as the emotionally evocative power of color.

They investigate the intersection of dream, desire and memory with powerful results. McGivern synthesizes historical and contemporary styles, creating evocative images that examine the tradition of abstract expressionism within the context of modern art, and the role of the artist as the creator of experience. McGivern’s inspiration comes from nature, humanity and her surroundings. She sees her own creative process as responding to the world around her, utilizing the internal, juxtaposing it with the external, and creating a synthesis of the two. Her aim to capture the mood, nature, and ephemerality of place is informed by an interest in the place of the individual within environment itself. To accomplish this, she draws on a keen eye and a reservoir of experience to transform seemingly separate components into a whole. She succeeds in creating pieces that viewers can relate to, works that combine artistic stimulation with the portrayal of the essential beauty and mystery of life. “Capturing a moment in a shape is both a beautiful and a dangerous struggle; a struggle reflective, in some ways, of many experiences common to all of us in our lives,” McGivern notes. “I imagine something and go after it until I see it materialize. In essence it is a dialogue between my thoughts and the painted canvas.”

Her free-form abstracts reflect an intense and energetic physicality, becoming exuberant expressions of pleasure and vitality. Their relevance emerges in the tension between control and spontaneity. Such fluid, vibrant works are evidence that she is a painter on the cusp of brilliance and emerging onto the art scene. Her latest series exhibits a thematic evolution for McGivern. Within these new works she documents intimate mementos and happenings of a specific place. She calls attention to that which is often underappreciated. By recording these stories and experiences visually, the artist gives them significance. These recent art works highlight a penchant for dynamic forms and bursts of color. They become newfound things of beauty: joyful, desolate, elevating, poignant visions.

McGivern frees herself from stereotyping because she does not limit herself to one singular style or approach. Her pieces embody the grace, agility and elegance of dream. They are evocative, dramatic, romantic, sometime surreal symphonies of beauty that provide the viewer with meditative explorations of familiar memories, dreams and even realities.

2004, Studied Art and Graphic Design, Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy

2005, BA in Studio Art, Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio

2009, Post Baccalaureate, Visual Communications, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois