As an oil painter she puts extraordinary colour to ordinary things.
Brittany Kolbuc sees colour in things that don’t exist in the real world and her artwork offers us regular humans some insight into her vision. And it’s amazing.
“Everything used to be in the box – had to be structured and just so – and that’s what my portraits were,” Kolbuc said about how she went from a portrait artist to an out-of-the-box creative.
“It was just a complete jump into colour. I have a black dog and I don’t look at him and see black. I see blue and all these different colours in him. A lot of it is actually allowing yourself to get lost in it. I have a house and I have kids and I am used to doing things properly and then you have to throw caution to the wind and don’t listen to the voice inside your head that keeps telling you that you’re doing it wrong. Now I do it wrong and things are taking off where as before when I ‘stayed in the lines’ I was just stagnant – there was no growth.”
Kolbuc, who is Taku Tlingit & Tahltan First Nations, said she feels she’s always been artistic but it was someone special in her life that encouraged her to shine.
“It was my stepmom that nurtured me,” Kolbuc said. “And nobody else in my family is very artistic. I never really did anything with it. I actually wanted to be a reporter – a journalist – so I never went anywhere with my art.”
Only when she moved into her own place as a young adult did she start to explore with paint.
“I did a Blink 182 logo in acrylics and oils and it took eight months to dry because I didn’t know what I was doing,” Kolbuc recalled with a smile. “So I would draw and sketch and didn’t really paint again until about 2011 and it was not good and then I kinda dropped it again. One of my favourite things I have read is that in order to get good at something you have to be OK with being bad at it. And I was.”
It wasn’t until about three years ago that she started painting portraits as she had continued to dabble in art throughout the years, figuring out how to use oils and teaching herself colour values.
“And then about four months ago I was doing a portrait and I was so fed up with it,” Kolbuc said. “I felt I just wasn’t going anywhere with it.”
She had to get out of her head.
“So my husband said ‘paint me a monkey and I’ll buy it from you’,” Kolbuc said.
“And I said ‘I can’t paint animals, I’ve never done that!’
She paused for a second and took a breath.
“It was a good monkey,” Kolbuc said softly. “And I was so shocked. I could not believe I did it.”
Kolbuc had created the painting in about three hours and when she posted it on social media somebody wanted it immediately. The tradeoff was Simon, Kolbuc’s husband, said she could sell the monkey if she painted him a pig, which now graces the wall of his office – even though people wanted that one, too.
“Then I painted a cow and somebody wanted that,” Kolbuc recalled. “That’s when I decided to start a page called Oils by Brittany to see where it would go and since then I have been doing non-stop commissions. It’s pretty crazy.”
Kolbuc’s latest piece is a lighthouse. It echoes another of her works she did recently of the Northern Lights over a teepee, in honour of her First Nations heritage.
“But this one is just for me,” Kolbuc smiled.
Check out Oils By Britt on Instagram and Oils by Brittany on Facebook.
