Dina Brodsky: Cycling Guide to Lilliput

Dina Brodsky was born in Minsk, Belarus and emigrated to the United States as a child. She studied at The Amsterdam Academy of Fine Art in The Netherlands, The University of Massachusetts and The New York Academy of Art. She has had prestigious solo exhibitions, and participated in many group shows, in Europe and the United States. She currently lives and works in New York.

She makes small, circular paintings on copper discs of carefully observed and recorded landscapes. Hers is a classical technique, deploying skilful handling of colour, tone and texture to describe specific location, time of day, weather and atmosphere. The paintings are produced in series and document particular journeys: long-distance ones which the artist makes on bicycle. The artist refers to these journeys as one of the great passions of her life. Each painting in the series is a return to a significant place and moment, fixing a visual memory in an exquisitely rendered miniature.

The artist was drawn to the format by her studies of Islamic miniature painting and illuminated manuscripts. She has arrived at a technique which allows for intensely condensed expression, an effective way of concentrating and distilling experience. Her content references the painters George Inness and Albert Bierstadt, great documentarians of the romantic American landscape. In such subject matter she sees a similar repository of human experience and aspiration.

Dina Brodsky talks of the miniature as an aid to meditation, an object which encourages intimate contemplation. The paintings are devices for the recall of significant personal memory. In their uniform and systematic configuration they operate like stations of the cross, acting as associative triggers to access the painter’s world. The circular format of the painting echoes the artist’s bicycle wheel. As the artist continues her journey it turns, generating new views and situations, new material for her miniature paintings, Lilliputian in scale, but big in effect.