Local Artist Buzz, Elizabeth Bram

By Sonia Lee Garber

I’ve always wondered what my life would be like had my creativity been more nurtured as a child. Elizabeth Bram was lucky enough to have parents that protected and nurtured her creative inclinations. In fact, Bram’s mother told her she was the most talented person she had ever met! She encouraged Bram to paint whatever she wanted without regard to what others may think of it. “Everyone’s looking for their inner child, but mine never went away.” says Bram.

Bram’s work is both childlike and sophisticated, with bold shapes and colors placed alongside one another in at once a perfect, yet uninhibited way. Bram’s mother also told her that she had a “hotline to her unconscious.” Although Bram did attend art school, the first year they were there she and the other students voted not to hold traditional classes.

“You can’t really say I went to art school. I mean it was more like a [creative] commune. “We did the hippie, New Age thing.” says Bram. Bran’s work resonated strongly with the Outsider art community. “You have to be unique to do art,” says Bram.

The very untraditional art school that Bram attended was the Silvermine College of Art in New Canaan, Connecticut. It was there that Bram voted, along with the other students, not to have formal classes. Although, there was a life drawing class that took place. Bram refused to go because she did not want it to interfere with the way she viewed the world. Instead, Bram painted her own huge murals which were well liked by her teachers and peers.

Bram also studied at Empire State College in New York City, where she was able to make up her own degree. Bram studied French and “did a lot of paper making and sculpture and foreign languages.” In addition to French, Bram studied Italian and German. In all her years of learning, she was never deterred from thinking her own way about things. Although she is educated in art therapy, Bram considers herself to be an artist first, and then a writer. She has written and illustrated children’s picture books published by Greenwillow Books, the Dial Press and Random House. “Rufus the Writer” is her most recent written children’s book and it can be found on Amazon. Additionally, she wrote a book about her experiences entitled, “Zero Gravity: Diary od a Traveling Artist.”

Bram is a renowned artist not only in Peekskill but around the world. Bram has shown at the Grapevine Gallery in London, England, the Eden Court Theater in Inverness, Scotland, La Maison de La Ville in Lachute, Quebec, the ORCA Gallery in Vidalia, Georgia, the Minot Gallery in Minot, North Dakota, The Center for Psychological Studies in Albany, California, the Sun Cities Museum of Art in Sun City, Arizona, and many other places.

On the day of our interview, we met at a group show put on by the Peekskill Arts Alliance at the Field Library in Peekskill. We stayed for a while, viewing the artwork, (in which Bram’s work is included), and from there we travelled to the neighboring hamlet of Montrose, to the Hendrick Hudson Library where she had a solo show on exhibit.

We talked more and I discovered that Bram is fluent in French, having spent a year abroad while she was enrolled at Silvermine, in their program in Lacoste, France. Bram also studied Italian and German and continues to do so. When she’s not making art or studying a foreign language, she enjoys taking long walks along the Hudson River.

“Because the thing about Peekskill is it’s beautiful and there’s mountains and there’s a river…plus you get to think about stuff when you’re walking…I might think of a color or shape of a painting and what I want to do with it.” says Bram. Bram has carved out a nice life for herself here in Peekskill, where she’s resided for the past seven years. Bram came here from Long Island, after discovering Peekskill in a book entitled, “The Hundred Best Small Art Towns.”

“I’ve created a life here in which I have a lot of free time to do exactly what I want to do….I hike, I paint, I study languages almost every day… I have my little nest and I paint pictures and I make the best of it. And we’ll see how it turns out. You know, I don’t know what will happen. Some people have plans. I’m just open to like how does it unfold? And that’s how a painting is. It unfolds. You don’t know what it is until you do it. And then if the painting doesn’t feel right, you sit with it. This is like art therapy. You sit with it and you feel it…if I don’t like something, I start changing it and listen to it. And sometimes it works.” says Bram.

Bram strikes me as a woman that knows who she is and what she likes. She proudly confesses that her paintings bring out her inner happiness. She likes her own art, many artists are overly critical of their own work, but Bram does not treat herself in that way. Again, she never lost tough with her “inner child”, and she continues to nurture it just as her parents did when they were raising her. Peekskill is fortunate to have such a joyous artist among all of the other talented artists that live here. Bram is easy to talk to and she is a woman that knows how to make herself happy. In closing, I asked Bram what she would say to someone that wants to be an artist but feels too inhibited? Bram replied with a smile.

“Be yourself. No one else is qualified.”

For further information about Elizabeth Bram’s work:

ebram@webtv.net

https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/elizabeth-bram