Sweet, Sweet Poison: The Art of Brandi Milne
On a perfect day, I would get up and not snooze,” says Brandi Milne of her ideal day at work. She would then head into the studio at her Huntington Beach, California home, do some warm-up sketches and paint for about eight hours. She would remember to take breaks to stretch. (“That’s really important and I never do it,” she says.) She would work “completely in the zone” with music playing in the background. Music, she says, is a big point of inspiration and her tastes range from Billie Holiday to Mastodon to disco. “Then I would stop, put that away and become a human and live my married life,” she says.
There’s a fine line between work and life and, for the past few years, Milne has been honing that balance in a way that has made an impact on her art.
Milne’s paintings often fuse the personal with the universal. Not long before our interview, she showed a new work, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” in a group show Art of Female at Burgundy Room Gallery in Los Angeles. It’s a self-portrait of the artist as a baby with a roly-poly doll used as a reference that reflects who humans are before we’re influenced by the outside world. “It’s not about me,” says Milne. “It’s universally about going back to when you’re pre-formed and the spirit that you had then.”
In the 2000s, Milne found herself in the midst of a whirlwind of art in Los Angeles, showing at events like Cannibal Flower and Create::Fixate and venues like The Hive Gallery. It was an unexpected turn of events for Milne, who had been making art at home for herself and her friends without thinking that it would become her career.
“At that time, I would say yes to anything,” she says. “I was constantly creating work and showing and really just going for it at that time. It was kind of like a party for me. I was stoked.”
One of those shows was We’re All Mad Here, a group exhibition at Gallery1988 in Los Angeles that centered around the Cheshire Cat. Milne contributed three watercolor acrylic works that were larger than pieces she had previously shown. Each sold, which surprised her. Moreover, she received a lot of positive feedback. In fact, that very show brought her to the attention of publisher Baby Tattoo, who has since released all three of her books. “I think that show made me take myself and my work a little more seriously,” she says.
In 2018, Milne celebrated the tenth anniversary of her first book, So Good for Little Bunnies, with a special edition. A decade earlier, the story took shape as she was moving out of her family’s house to get married. “I was feeling free for the first time to not be at home with my parents. Then, also, I was feeling kind of anxious. Did I do the right thing?” she recalls.
Ten years later, her perspective has changed about the book’s impact. “It’s such a gentle story,” she says. “I can see a lot of myself in it, which is a really good reminder to shoot for what you want to say, what you’re going through, and making art out of that kind of thing.”
Milne’s most recent solo show, Once Upon a Quiet Kingdom, ran at Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles in 2017 and proved to be an important turning point in the artist’s career. “If the Gallery1988 show made me take myself and my work a little more seriously, this last show at Corey Helford in 2017 absolutely did,” says Milne. “It pushed me even further… It was a good time and I’m really happy with the work that I did.”
It took three years to bring Once Upon a Quiet Kingdom to fruition. “I gave myself a year before I was going to start painting the show to recharge my battery, to find what I wanted to talk about, to get inspired, to do some studying—just breathing and being a human and not working at the same pace that I had been for all those years,” Milne explains.
….if you look back on your younger self, like most of us, you can see how you’ve changed and the layers make you more informed, more thoughtful. You know yourself better. That’s what I see in my work.
Slowing down allowed Milne’s ideas to become a reality. The result was a body of works that tapped into powerful emotions with Milne’s signature use of visual references that draw from vintage toys and design, holiday decorations, nature, and sweets. “Is Life Like This for Everyone?” speaks of grief with red and black foliage. “Death Song (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, in Death)” depicts a skeleton with candy-pink hair and wearing a large, yellow ruff that recalls a flower in bloom.
Milne’s color palette grew bolder with deep shades of red and pink and intense blues and greens. Her use of color shifted, in part, because of her self-reflection. “In years past, my work was a little more muted.” Milne explains that she found a freedom in getting to know herself in a way that extends to her paintings. “You’re no longer second-guessing or trying to do something that you think other people would do or use the colors that a serious artist would use, but really saying what do I want to use? How do I want my viewers to be affected by my colors?”
At the time of this interview, Milne was in the midst of preparing for her next solo show, scheduled for fall 2019 at Dorothy Circus in Rome, and she has come to understand a lot about how her work has evolved over the course of a career spanning over fifteen years.
“When I just started showing, I feel like I didn’t know myself very well,” says Milne. “I was working a lot. I wasn’t giving it a lot of breath or a lot of time. So, if I look back on that work, I can see that. I can see that I wasn’t self-aware.”
She continues, “That doesn’t sound very flattering, but if you look back on your younger self, like most of us, you can see how you’ve changed and the layers make you more informed, more thoughtful. You know yourself better. That’s what I see in my work. I see that change all these years later.”*
This article first appeared as part of our Hi-Fructose Special insert in Issue 51, which is sold out. Get our latest issue of Hi-Fructose by subscribing here today.
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