Brief Bio - Jackie Braitman

I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of following my passions in life.  It’s not that I have money – I’m neither rich nor poor.  But I had an upbringing that taught me that happiness is more important than money.  And that with grit and confidence, I could pursue whatever I wanted.  I’ve supported myself with my passions for 50 years.

Equally adept in both right- and left-brain activities, I’ve followed passions in both spheres.  As a younger adult and mid-level professional, I pursued more analytic careers such as software development and corporate management and relegated my artistic side to avocations.  As I became more confident in myself, I found ways to integrate both the analytic and artistic into my later careers – first as the owner of a home design/remodeling firm and now as a full-time sculptor.  My sculptural work is heavy in digital design and fabrication.  

While these career choices might seem disparate, the common thread is my nature as an agent of change. I can’t see something without wanting to improve it – whether it’s an organization, a process or a thing.  When I was younger, I welcomed the challenge of improving the performance of organizations. As I got a bit older, I welcomed the challenge of improving the lives of homeowners. Now, I’m pursuing a more selfish challenge to explore my life-long attraction to the power of the body in motion.  And my “change agency” shows itself by continuing to challenge myself to find better ways of depicting motion in static materials.

I have a B.A. in Government and a Ph.D. in Decision Analysis and am self-trained in the arts.

Artist’s Talk - for Tiny Taiga, Santa Fe, NM.

My challenge: How do I change static, unyielding materials into the essence of motion. My passion is the motion — not the material. And thus, I explore different materials, at different scales, and with different levels of abstraction to explore how to enhance a sense of rhythm and motion in a static sculpture. The female dancer is the ideal subject because we recognize and relate to the forms — even with differing levels of abstraction. In exploring different materials, I use the inherent quality of the material — such as the transparency of glass or the grain of the wood — to enhance the rhythm of the motion. For example, in my most recent series, the rhythmic repetition of hard planes of steel provides a dramatic type of rhythm that enhances the sense of motion. While the direction of the steel planes can emphasize the musculature of the body.