Growing up, Dina Brodsky was convinced she was going to be a veterinarian or a professional hitchhiker. “My mother was a musician, and a lot of her friends were artists, but I was always more interested in animals and adventuring,” she admitted in an interview with Whitehot Magazine.
All that changed after she started going to university, where she accidentally ended up taking a foundations art class. “Within less than a week I was completely in love (or addicted, depending on the point of view) – I knew that this was what I wanted to do, every day, for the rest of my life,” she says.
Now a full-time artist, she works as both a painter and a curator. A contemporary realist miniaturist, she admits that she likes to stick to smaller-scaled work. “I don’t think I was ever anything except for a miniature painter, although I’ve tried painting on all sorts of scales,” she says. “I remember my mother taking me to a children’s art school in Minsk that one of her friends was running – I must have been around 5. He asked me to draw a figure, and put me in front of an easel with a large pad of newsprint, I drew a figure that took up a tiny corner. He asked me to try again, bigger, and I drew something only slightly bigger- after a few attempts he told my mother he couldn’t really teach me.”
“I think I’m incredibly fortunate, because, within the last 15 years that I’ve been working as a professional artist, the art world has started to emerge from what I always thought of as a sort of dark age,” she says. “I think for a lot of the 20th century the mainstream art world has been dominated by art that is very commercial, conceptually heavy-handed and visually bland.”
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