Brittany Ferns is an Australian Visual Artist based in Newcastle, NSW. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Communication and Design and spent ten years working as a textile designer and graphic designer in Sydney and Los Angeles.
Ferns' idyllic images hold a nostalgia for the discovery of new places, and the passage of time through memory. Her paintings are not directly painted from life, but are in fact a direct manifestation from her imagination, creating a tranquil place for the mind to rest in such a hectic world. In A sense her portraits are controlled, her subjects denoting stiff stoic poses, they are in fact of no one in particular but iconographic to Mexican culture, inspired by the naïve style of twentieth century painter Frida Kahlo.
Her soft, muted palette, while philosophically decorative, is a strong component to her visual language. Although serving to control the painting, to relax the viewer and evoke a sense of calm, her pastel palette communicates that these images are thematically ephemeral, decayed and sun bleached, connoting a sense of the destruction of time. Ferns' process involves the physical scraping back of the surface to reveal hidden layers.