Brett Bigbee
Joe (Self-Portrait), 1994–99, oil on canvas, 60" x 51", Collection of Seven Bridges Foundation
I paint what truly concerns me: my wife, the growth of my sons, and my own progress toward maturity. My struggle is to create images of psychological veracity and depth. My means are drawn from those traditional formats and devices that suit my sensibility and tend to be deliberate, refined, and emblematic.
—Brett Bigbee
Brett Bigbee's iconic figure paintings and drawings are both specific in their details and universal in their appeal. An artist of extraordinary technical ability who was trained at the academically-oriented Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bigbee creates paintings characterized by meticulous attention to detail, carefully built-up and layered surfaces, richly modeled forms, and a penetrating stillness. He has chosen as his subject his family and immediate environment, in part because of their easy availability but also because of his interest in exploring family relationships and growth. Using himself, his wife Ann, and their sons Joe and James as models, Bigbee creates harmonious compositions in which color, gesture, expression, line, and form are as important as the likeness of the individual depicted.
The frontal and mannered poses of Bigbee's figures, as well as their stylization and symbolic qualities, are inspired by sources as varied as Italian and Northern Renaissance painting, Folk Art, and the paintings of Goya and Balthus. Yet Bigbee invests these images with a psychological intensity that is very much his own. In Joe (Self-Portrait), Bigbee expands the tradition of Madonna and Child paintings with a tender father and child painting that acknowledges and celebrates the role that many contemporary fathers (including Bigbee) now play in the raising of their children.
—Rachel Rosenfield Lafo
Director of Curatorial Affairs
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, June 23 at 3pm
