We were lucky to catch up with Brenda Zlamany recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brenda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

When I was six, the nuns asked the kids in my class what we wanted to do with our lives. My first career choice was to be an astronaut, but they said that was only for boys, and my second choice, a nun, was not for lefties. Being an artist was my third career choice, and in the end, it was the best choice for me. I grew up in a family where achievement was not valued, especially for girls. Funds were set aside for my wedding, but not for college. So I looked outside of the family for role models and at thirteen, I started hitchhiking after school as a way of meeting people and learning about their career choices. I’d pick a general direction at random and interview the drivers who picked me up until it was time to turn around and hitchhike home for dinner.
Through hitchhiking, I became good at interpreting faces. When a car pulled over, I’d poke my head into the window and study the driver’s expression. I only had a few seconds to read every line. If I got it wrong, there were consequences. Through these impromptu glances, I became an expert, and the skills I developed then continue to play a role in my ability to quickly capture complex psychological moments in my portraits.
When I was fourteen, a chance encounter changed the course of my life. While hitchhiking, I was picked up by a New Haven high school teacher whose husband was the head of the Yale Art Gallery. They invited me for dinner at their home in New Haven, where an amazing art collection was installed. Inspired, I showed them some of my drawings. One thing led to another, and I was admitted to a selective high school focused on the arts and a pre-college program at Yale. This eventually led to a full scholarship at Wesleyan University.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

​Reinvigorating portraiture has been the focus of my work since my first portrait exhibition. The show featured portraits of well-known bald male artists and opened in 1994, when portraiture was being disavowed and both figurative painting and the production of beauty were considered white-male relics, off-limits to serious female artists. The hostility toward those practices made me consider that they must harbor a forgotten power, so I secretly studied the works of the “masters” in museums and painted small, jewel-like, labor-intensive still lifes of animals and portraits from observation. My early paintings combined old-master techniques with a postmodern conceptual approach, creating a feminist perspective by reversing the traditional male gaze. The show’s success led to important commissions, which in turn expanded my practice to include historical figures. For instance, the New York Times Magazine invited me to paint Jeffrey Dahmer for an artist-created issue on evil in 1995, Marian Anderson for an article by Jessye Norman in 1996, and Osama bin Laden for the cover of the September 11, 2005, issue.

In 2006 my portrait of the artist Alex Katz was selected for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. When it was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, it was noticed by the curator for the art collection of the World Bank, and in 2007 I became the first female artist to be commissioned by the World Bank when I painted a portrait of the bank’s retiring president, James D. Wolfensohn.

My latest public works, ambitious large-scale group portraits of underrepresented women and people of color, are helping expand diversity in the iconography of public spaces. Among my public commissions are Portrait of Discovery (2021), a monumental portrait depicting five trailblazing women scientists from Rockefeller University, permanently installed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Reception Hall in New York City, and the Davenport Dining Room Scene (2018), a large-scale painting on two panels of nine diverse portrait subjects permanently installed in the dining room at Davenport College, Yale University. In 2015 I won the competition to paint a portrait of Yale’s first seven women PhDs. This painting is permanently installed in the university’s Sterling Memorial Library and my portrait of feminist icon Elga Ruth Wasserman, scheduled for unveiling at Yale, will join it there this summer. I also recently won the competition for the large-scale portrait of William and Martha Brown, part of a program to bring impactful Black and indigenous Americans to the walls of the Great Hall Portrait Gallery in Worcester, MA.

Nearly three decades after my first portrait exhibition, I remain fascinated by the possibilities and multifaceted nature of portraiture, especially in the digital age. The process of painting a portrait creates a gradual yet intense connection between the artist and subject in the act of building an image stroke by stroke. This visceral connection is unusual in a time of virtual reality and high-speed, mediated experience. There remains, however, much to be explored in the question of who is portrayed and how. I hope to continue expanding the boundaries of portraiture by creating works with and about people who are underrepresented in society and art.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

​From starting and finishing a painting and beyond there are so many aspects of being an artist–especially a portraitist who creates works for public spaces–that are rewarding. Because I paint real people and my portraits will either contribute to the subject’s legacy or, when they are less known (and possibly no longer with us), create their legacy, there is a great deal of responsibility, trust, empathy, and research involved.

I begin each project with an understanding of the physical location in which the portrait will hang and the community who will live with the painting. I love history, and in addition to studying photographs, paintings, and films about the subject as well as their works, I consume music and literature from their era, and learn about politics and fashions of the time. And since my painting will eventually enter into a discourse with the history of art, I also examine past paintings that relate to my concept for the specific portrait.

Often, there are very few images of a historical subject and I must hire models as body doubles to create the pose and rent costumes from the period to examine the light on the fabrics. I also use allegorical objects to tell the viewer about the subject’s achievements, and researching these can lead to new discoveries for me. For instance, in the Rockefeller portrait not only did I investigate historical scientific instruments in their instrument collection, I also worked with an expert to assemble specific instruments in shapes that were pleasing in my composition. Putting together a complex historical painting involves hours of detective work in locating obscure objects and images and skill in assembling them, a complex puzzle eventually leading to a final sketch that must appear both seamless and effortless. Arriving at a sketch for each new project involves an exciting journey into a variety of different fields, encounters with a vast array of unfamiliar objects, and deep dives into specific historical periods.

Once a sketch is approved, I begin painting and it is a pleasure to watch as the subjects slowly come to life on the canvas. Eventually, the portrait is unveiled, and seeing it function in its final location is perhaps the most gratifying part of the process. Except when I happen upon a young girl posing, for instance, with my portrait of Yale’s first seven women PhDs on social media and I see that my work has inspired her to dream about her own future.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I am a single mother by choice. Before the birth of my daughter in 2000, I was represented by galleries in New York and Europe, and I produced and exhibited major bodies of work regularly, which were well-received and reviewed in important publications. After the birth of my daughter, I started taking on more commissions, in part because the gallery that I was working with closed during the 2007–2008 financial crisis and I was supporting my child alone and needed a reliable income, but also because there were fewer opportunities for me as a single mom with limited funds for childcare and little time to network in the art world. Gradually, as my focus shifted to public works, I left the commercial gallery system and began exhibiting in noncommercial spaces.

It is a privilege to be selected for and to be able to choose to work on challenging projects for public institutions involving the crucial work of getting overlooked historical figures–women and people of color–on their walls. And while these ambitious commissions have provided a reliable source of income and allowed me to continue painting, they have more importantly allowed me to grow as an artist and interact with various communities while raising my daughter. Recently my daughter graduated from college and because there is less financial pressure, in addition to continuing with public work, I have been able to produce a major body of large-scale oil paintings for a one-person exhibition, informed by developments from my public commissions. This body of work is allowing me to reenter the exciting discourse on figurative painting, a discourse that I helped build in my early career.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.brendazlamany.com
• Instagram: @brenda_zlamany
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brenda.zlamany/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenda-zlamany-a6567b146/

Image Credits
Jenny Gorman, Ian Christmann, and Robert Lowell