Today we’d like to introduce you to Jasmine Brown-Rasé.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Jasmine. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My dad was the first to introduce me to art, he would buy me figurines and books that taught me the skill behind shading, proportion, and perspective. Over time, this developed into painting and I subsequently started to explore portraiture.
Painting was my main medium up until the foundation where I was encouraged to explore sculpture due to the nature of some of my sketches. The rest was history in terms of me pursuing a contemporary artist career, as I loved experimenting with materials and pushing their physical qualities. For me, I considered sculpture to be freedom.
I went to The University at Edinburgh College of Art and studied Sculpture where in my third year I did a six-month exchange at The University of California Los Angeles. This was probably the turning point and most integral part of my young artist career as I found a subject area that I felt needed to be explored and truly cared about, which was identified and cultural politics.
This brings me to my most recent endeavor that is my undergraduate degree show (which if you look close enough you would see emotional and physical sweat, blood and tears mingled within the work). I explored my Mauritian, Jamaican and British heritage and how rhizomatic my identity is. I used materials such as London bricks, red clay that is similar to Mauritian soil and Jamaican sugar cane. Subsequently creating a self-portrait with a variety of materials that ultimately helped shape who I am. With this piece, I wanted to question societies tendency of labeling and categorizing in a binary fashion and its subsequent validity.
To be honest, this last year has highlighted how fickle my relationship with art is, as there were many times where I would sit there in my studio questioning why I doing this, especially at 2 am in the morning. However, the finished result alleviates these anxieties… most of the time ☺. In my opinion, if the journey isn’t challenging then the outcome is guaranteed to be anticlimactic.
Has it been a smooth road?
Art has the tendency to be quite inaccessible to either the general public or people who are not the artist. Finding that balance that allowed other people to appreciate my work but also maintains the integrity of my concept has been a challenge throughout my learning/career.
Opinions are given freely and frequently in art and it’s not wholly different from Christmas, you either receive the stocking filled with goodies or filled with charcoal or mixture of both. This is where I had to realize, sometimes the hard way, that my art will not be loved by everyone, but I can work my hardest to get the majority to appreciate my work. This brings me on to how I treated my ‘failed’ artworks, although I like to call them test runs so I will refer to them hence forth as test runs! With this, I learned to see this test runs as an opportunity to mature and learn from my past decisions. Sounds ridiculously cliché however it was important in my growth as an artist and individual; as my Dad would say the glass is always half full, never half empty.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
So, although I am a recent Sculpture Graduate I am currently providing commissioned portraits and am thoroughly enjoying it, as it gives me a sense of nostalgia, taking me back to my childhood. Also, it’s fun to see how each painting differs from the next due to my mood, change in lighting and color combinations. I am currently in the midst of building my studio which will allow me to continue with my three-dimensional exploration.
I think that one of my greatest assets is my refusal to follow conventional rules and find it exciting to push boundaries and stumble upon discoveries. Like when I was in the second year and decided to boil down 8litres of coke that then became a cast of a coke can.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
From my brief but fun stay in Los Angeles, I can say that it seems to be a great place for start-up companies since everyone there seems to be open-minded and willing to try new things. One of the main things that I enjoyed whilst I was in L.A, was seeing the frequency of different shops and business popping up and changing, creating this urgency to visit and see what they were about in fear of them disappearing in the next couple of weeks. I also think the exposure that L.A. provides is super helpful in the growth and networking of startups.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jasminebrown-rase.com
- Email: samijen.yuri@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/jbr.lemornevista
Image Credit:
www.jasminebrown-rase.com
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