A girl called Brett

My latest artistic inamorata is a Chicago-based artist named Brett Manning, who likes to make it clear that she is in fact a girl. Her website, Brettisagirl.com, is distinctly feminine, showcasing her gorgeous portfolio on a backdrop of nostalgic, wallpaper-pink- so there is no confusion there. Brett is a girl.

Brett does paintings and photography, but it’s her ink drawings that I’m most enchanted by.

Her images are mostly of girls, and she captures something strikingly soft and beautiful about each one, even as they merge into the realm of the surreal and, at times, grotesque. While her figures grow distorted and strange, she never loses her very feminine aesthetic, managing to imbue every image with such charm and stylishness that they somehow wouldn’t be entirely out of place in a fashion magazine.

She describes her work as being largely about the connection of all living things, and the idea of man-made versus nature. She is enamoured by the charm of the dream-like. There is a real delicacy to her images, and her very subtle use of colour and sharing gives each drawing a distinct sense of being not-quite of this world, though intensely familiar and nostalgic at the same time.

It’s interesting the way she talks about the process of drawing- and it’s something that any of us with any artistic inclinations can perhaps relate to. Drawing, for Brett, is a spiritual and meditative process. ‘When I am creating,’ she says, ‘I feel calm and at one with my surroundings, specifically with the art work, it becomes part of me, almost like a view into my brain at any specific moment, and strangely autobiographical.’

In this sense, her work is all about speaking the truth. ‘Nowhere in any of my pieces will one ever find a shard of falsehood,’ she says. In this poignant, storybook world, dreams become reality, and reality becomes a dream. And girls who stand upside down on tree branches, hide behind masks and sprout huge goblin ears are just the same as us.

Brett wants to challenge us. She wants us to look for parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed. She wants us to find pieces of ourselves in these strange and otherworldly girls. And honestly, I would love to be wrapped up in an enormous patchwork knit on a windy day, hair blowing around me like ribbons. I’d love to be one of those surly small children curled up on the couch with their headphones on. I’d even love to have clown make-up on my face and have spaceships flying at me.

‘It’s pretty simple,’ she says. ‘But very complex…. And completely absurd.’ That it is, Brett. That it is.