AboutIsabella (Bella) Briganti is a Denver-based artist from Colorado. Her love of art was fostered from an early age by her family and grandfather, who was a professional cartoonist. A majority of her art practice is based on lived experiences and adjacent associations, she focuses on introspection and reflections on the relationships we form. Although much of her work consists of oils and acrylic paintings, exploration of media and subject is something that Bella values and enjoys. She takes every opportunity to work from life, and enjoys compositing photographs that she takes to create reference images for her paintings. Currently, her work is heavily focused on the human figure in mildly abstracted settings.
Her illustrative work is geared towards the combination of art and science in the form of scientific illustrations using specimens she collects. She hopes to work in the scientific illustration field in the spirit of educating herself and others on the wonderful and/or weird things that coexist with us in the world by cataloging her surroundings, thus further explore and depict her observations on relationships. She graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Practices at the University of Colorado Denver, with an emphasis in Drawing and Painting, a sub-emphasis in Illustration, and a minor in Biology. Bella has shown her work in sixteen exhibitions, eleven of which were juried. She has worked with galleries and artists such as Jaime Molina, Oliver Herring, and the Emmanuel Gallery. She recently completed the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver's Creator's Studio Internship for Summer of 2024, with a grant from a board of donors based on a project pitch for work to be produced in 2025. Bella hopes to continue to build relationships with other artists both locally and internationally. |
Artist Statement
One of my first mentors in the arts described art as a celebration of life. I have followed this philosophy for some time, however, I look to expand on it. Not only is art a celebration of life and the experiences of being human, but also an investigation of those things. There is an indescribable amount of nuance and emotion in this world, and my purpose is to dig into those places and unearth the messages that are hiding there.
Being a person hurts. Feeling and acknowledging that struggle is important, but it is also important to figure out why that pain is there. The main goal of my work is to connect; connect to the audience, to other artists, to connect to myself more fully and more deeply. There is nuance present in these battles, and I seek to codify it so that this suffering does not have to remain, but can transform into a space of growth, healing, and learning. I find inspiration in these difficult places. I wish to look deeper and create work that sparks conversations around them and encourages others to do investigations of their own. I seek to transcribe my findings and my questions into the physical and visual language of two and three dimensional artworks with techniques and mediums that speak to the specific concept of the piece being created. – Isabella (Bella) L. Briganti |