ABOUT THE ARTIST

Chica Brunsvold, Signature Member of both the National and American Watercolor Societies, was originally trained as an abstract expressionist painter, and has continued to paint expressionistic canvases over the course of much of her career. But from the beginning of her art education, Brunsvold had the ability to perceive animals in the texture or facture of her canvases. Because her training took place within an abstract expressionist orthodoxy, however, which frowned upon seeing "secondary images" in abstract elements, Brunsvold repressed her facility for drawing forth these images from textured surfaces for years.

Finally, in 1994, Brunsvold decided that she had arrived at a level of maturity to do exactly what she wished in her art. She began at last to explore her instinctive ability to perceive animals in her preexisting work, and let the hidden images come out. She treated a canvas until she achieved a mottled and textured polychrome surface. Rather than proceed to create an abstract expressionistic canvas, Brunsvold stopped, studied the surface of the canvas, carried it around with her, lived with it for a while, and, sometimes in muted pre-dawn light, at last discerned an intense, compact composition of animals arising directly from the texture of the work. Brunsvold quickly demarcated her vision and subsequently developed the composition into her first Zooillogicals ® painting.

Since that point, Brunsvold has nearly exclusively worked on her Zooillogicals ® series, using a similar method combining priming a textured surface and then perceiving compositions in the texture itself. Chica Brunsvold has had one person shows at the Paine Art Center & Gardens, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the Art Station, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Northwood University, Cedar Hill, Texas, the MSC Forsyth Gallery, Texas A&M University, the Ellen Noel Art Museum, Odessa, Texas, Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia, the Touchstone Gallery, Washington D.C., the Art League/Torpedo Factory, Alexandria, Virginia and the Burroughs/Chapin Art Museum, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the Atrium Galleries of both Fairfax INOVA Hospital in Virginia and the Children ’ s National Medical Center in D.C., This Century Gallery in Williamsburg, VA, Goodyear Cottage in Jekyll Island, GA, Longwood University in Farmville, VA, Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD, The Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida at Panama City, Strathmore Hall Art Center in Bethesda, MD and Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, VA.

Brunsvold is the recipient of the American Watercolor Society Harrison Cady Award, the Arts in Mississippi Award, and numerous others. Her work was on display with the Art in the Embassies program in Rangoon, Burma.

Brunsvold received B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, training to be an artist. After college, she served for five years as an Illustrator General with the CIA and then served for another year at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Her work is published in the magazines, Water Color Magic/Creativity 2001, Watercolor Magic/Yearbook 2001 and Watercolor Magic “ The Creative Challenge ” April 2006, The Watercolor Artist "Creative Challenge" February 2009, The Artist's Magazine "Competition Spotlight"March 2009 and in the books Splash 10 by North Light Books, The Artistic Touch 3 and 4 by Chris Unwin, Celebrating the Creative Artist Within and The Creative Edge both by Mary Todd Beam, and also The Artist's Muse by Betsy Dillard Stroud. She was a finalist in The Artist's Magazine's 26th Annual Art Competition, 2009 and a past president of the Potomac Valley Watercolorists.