Dina Brodsky’s growing presence online is in direct contrast to her miniature scaled subject matters. A contemporary miniaturist, painter, and curator, she’s known for her detailed (and rather tiny) drawings of architecture, trees, and wildlife.
Born in Minsk, Belarus, Brodsky moved to the US in 1991 where she studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before earning her MFA at the New York Academy of Art. Currently based in New York City, Brodsky admits she feels most comfortable painting small-scaled paintings.
“When I paint small I’m like a fish in water,” she exclaimed once in an interview with Whitehot Magazine. “I am much less comfortable painting on a larger scale, and very few of my large works hold up as well as the miniatures.”
Her most recent series, Secret Life of Trees, is dedicated entirely to trees, based on photographs, stories, and artifacts submitted by her friends and family. Brodsky’s painting technique relies on a combination of classical oil painting techniques—mostly 15th century Northern Renaissance methods and 17th-century Venetian techniques—with contemporary materials such as mylar and plexiglass.
But her process also relies on some creative intuition. “For me, color has always been intuitive,” says Brodsky. “When I was studying, the things I had trouble with had more to do with drawing, proportion, perspective, anatomy, architecture. I feel like I am still catching up and trying to master a lot of those things. But color has always come organically. I never think about what colors to mix, and how to achieve a certain effect, I just let the paint play together on my palette.”
In addition to being an artist and curating, Brodsky also teaches and runs an “Instagram for Artists” seminar where she teaches artists how to harness the power of the Instagram algorithm. Scroll down to see some of her work.
