BIO

Brittany Dolence is a Philadelphia-based artist with a multidisciplinary practice. Often informed by her adventurous rural upbringing, her romantic, contemporary paintings explore the threshold where beauty becomes restless and ethereal.

She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute (2008). Her work has been exhibited by Era Contemporary, The Jane Gallery, and Philadelphia Sketch Club, among others. She has been mentioned in publications such as Create! Magazine and Art in New York City.

Beyond her practice, Dolence also annually serves as a guest juror for the NYC Fellowship, apexart, participating in both national & international exhibitions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I make paintings and drawings that move between atmospheric abstraction and a more classically inflected sense of composition and touch. The work is rooted in a tension between softness and force: how beauty can hold pressure, how delicacy can become unstable, and how something ethereal can remain physically charged.

I am interested in beauty as a structure, a way of organizing tension, attention, and emotional intensity. The paintings often use soft, muted color, veiled space, botanical or atmospheric associations, and a sense of openness. But within that openness, I look for moments of friction: gestures that press, dissolve, scrape, or interrupt.

The work also engages the inherited opposition between beauty and the sublime. Beauty has often been associated with softness, pleasure, and the feminine, while the sublime has been linked to force, danger, and transcendence. My paintings question that division by allowing beauty itself to become restless, physical, and edged with threat.

My intention is to push the paintings so they retain their atmospheric openness without becoming passive. I want them to feel luminous but not weightless, delicate but not fragile, beautiful but not safe.