Dina Brodsky

Dina Brodsky is an American contemporary realist painter and curator.She is also a social media influencer and has over 350,000 followers on Instagram, as of January 2019. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Brodsky moved to the United States in 1991 and grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. She studied at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, before earning her MFA at the New York Academy of Art. She currently lives and works in New York City and teaches both privately, and in several institutions, including the Brookline Center for the Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

#53, 1/12/2016

ballpoint pen on paper,

5.75 x 4 in.

In 2016, Brodsky asked hundreds of thousands of followers of her various social media outlets, including Facebook & Instagram, to send her photos of trees and corresponding stories. Each story was personal and kept secret by the artist. Using mostly these photos as references for her drawings, Brodsky started the series called The Secret Life of Trees comprising over 100 drawings of trees, all no larger than 11 x 14 inches and some as small as 3 x 5 inches. Some drawings were done only in ballpoint pen, while others were also painted with oil paint.

#48, 1/2/2016

ballpoint pen on handmade paper

6 x 4 in.

Dina says, “I started drawing from my sketches and photos I took while traveling. Then people I knew—friends and family at first, then people I only knew through social media—started sending me photos and stories of their favorite trees -some sent poems, as well as tree related traditions specific to their part of the world. The project continued after my son was born, as a way to vicariously see bits of the universe I wouldn’t otherwise have access to. In a way it was a sort of tree diary of that year of my life, during which my life changed dramatically.”

#73, 3/2/2016

ballpoint pen on paper

8 x 4 in.

In the artists words, “I tend to be compulsively detail-oriented in my painting practice—the longer I’m working on something, the more I end up thinking about the place I’m painting, either real or imaginary. I think eventually I start feeling like I know something of, or am communicating with, the past inhabitants of the places I’m painting, or at least the possible inhabitants of those places, as I imagine them.”