Braunig, who grew up in British Columbia, Canada, liked drawing and painting from a young age. Her father (a dentist) and mother (a nurse) enjoyed creative pursuits outside of work, and the house was full of art books. She loved watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which she credits as being just as formative, even more so, than going to museums.
Her parents encouraged her to attend an intensive summer art program at Skidmore College in upstate New York when she was 16. It was there that she first learned about Cooper Union, the New York City school where artists Lee Krasner and Wangechi Mutu got their start. Braunig decided it was the place for her.
New York City was the perfect place for the budding artist. “I was totally in love. It maybe ruined me forever,” she jokes now. She went to Yale right after Cooper, and then she moved to Maine in 2010, in her mid-20s. “I was really fortunate to have a New York gallery as I left the city, because I was able to have shows and have my work represented here even though I wasn’t here.”
Living somewhere far less expensive was also a game changer—she didn’t need to pile on jobs to make ends meet, and could instead focus on building her deeply personal style. “I had been exposed to so many influences coming to New York. And maybe those first five years in Maine were a time when I was able to process them alone.”
Braunig knows her art history, and she gets why people connect her style back to Surrealism. But her artistic comrades are more like French self-portraitist Claude Cahun or even Frida Kahlo, she says, “who’s really making work that is influenced by events of her own life.” Her art might feel dreamy (or perhaps like an acid trip), but “it’s not a dream space. I really am thinking about actual forces in the actual world.”
