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BY PAUL BICKLEY
Laura Brikmanis’ theater mural adorns the exterior of the Bloomington Playwrights Project’s Ted Jones Playhouse and you can find her bees on one side of the 2nd Street Artisan Alley building.
“Murals are about simplistic, eye-catching designs,” says Brikmanis, 39, who graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in English and fine arts. “Murals help pay the bills,” she says. “And if people are paying for art, they want it big.”
Brikmanis says she enjoys “playing with two sides of things in my oil-on-canvas paintings; one doesn’t do without the other.” That duality comes from her life. While a student at IU, Brikmanis was also a waitress and bartender at Bear’s Place, so she related to both town and gown while experiencing work at Bear’s from two perspectives, as well. Now bartending at The Back Door, she is “both part of the bar scene and separated from it by the bar.” Some of her pieces depict similar inside-outside dualities, such as one where waitresses sit in a booth, some working, others eating—all from the perspective of another waitress standing beside the table.
In her Baby Series, Brikmanis paints a kewpie doll or baby doll into several situations that seem potentially threatening to it. “The doll,” she says, “is a symbol of my inner child or something I hold dear. In some paintings, I’m making that ‘something’ uncomfortable, as I do to myself when my art is out there and no longer just mine.”
For more, visit Brikmanis Art on Facebook.
See more of Laura Brikmanis’s artwork in the photo gallery below. (Click on the photo below to view the gallery. Use the on-screen arrows or the arrows on your keyboard to navigate forward and backward.)
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