Robin Crofut-Brittingham - At the Edge of the Woods

Originally from Western Massachusetts, Robin Crofut-Brittingham received her BA from Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson (New York) with a focus in poetry and art history. She has spent the last two years living and working in San Francisco where she completed her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was recently a recipient of the Murphy Cadogan award through the San Francisco Foundation and of a Martha Boschen Porter Award through the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. "Drawing inspiration from myths, fairy tales, science fiction, as well as my own personal history, I have developed a non-linear visual narrative. The characters in my paintings exist in various imagined paradises. Within these worlds, I investigate the tension between the natural world as a reality in need of preservation and the natural world as a voluptuous, imagined garden of delight where fantasy unfolds and abundance is taken for granted. I primarily make works on paper because of their relationship to scientific illustration and to historical methods of visual archiving. Works on paper reference Persian miniature painting, Navajo painting, cartography and classical illustration – all of which have tremendous influence on my work. I intentionally try to vacillate between moments of perspectival flatness and moments of voluminous depth. For me, this reflects the way the natural world is often perceived: It is at once a place mediated by mythologies that fetishize it as an impenetrable Eden and also a place of recklessly consumed, voluminous abundance." - Robin Crofut-Brittingham