Contributed by Patrick Neal / The artist Libby Braden lives and works in an old East Village tenement apartment that recalls the austere bohemian enclaves of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Braden, who moved there in the early nineties, has embraced an essentially nocturnal existence. She logs onto the computer to begin her remote position as a financial administrator around midnight, finishing up with enough hours in the day to work on her drawing and painting before going to bed at around 4 PM. She is fully aware of parallels between the conventions of an ordinary office job and her own representational aesthetic. Both are grounded and populated, with ego, id, and superego mingling and overlapping in a circadian rhythm of awareness and unconsciousness.
Braden works with combinations of wet and dry mediums such as watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and ink on paper. She often depicts humans and animals in strange and unsettling urban settings – dry, claustrophobic fantasias in various states of euphoria and depression. She uses the same desk and workstation for her job and art making, with printers and scanners interspersed with colored pencils and tubes of paint. Braden looks into a mirror while she executes her paintings, a technique designed to correct blurred and distorted vision. Sketchbooks store insights from TV, YouTube, books, and travels that inform her work. A grid of headshots displayed atop her desk and a nearby stack of Russian nesting dolls serve as catalogues of facial expressions.
Braden’s bizarre figural groups – reminiscent of Mark Greenwold’s perverse compositions – are anchored by familiar spaces that recur across works. They include Braden’s own small apartment, bus-stops, LIRR cars, Penn Station, suburban neighborhoods, condominiums, and the ubiquitous open fields and forests of America. Vaguely creepy props in her apartment – a miniature chair, assorted urns, a violin – make their way into her paintings. She conjures imagined and actual people in her life and finds on Google mugshots of perps frozen in time at their most vulnerable. Braden prefers to draw these moments of arrest from the mediated source. Some of her compositions have eerie monochromatic palettes, others full-on color. Owing to her long experience in figure drawing, she can derive an entire fleshed-out body from an abbreviated physiognomy. In landscape paintings, she has referenced the estuaries of Bear Mountain State Park and likes to discover faces in the trunks and bark of old trees.
Braden grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and Kansas City and describes herself as an art school dropout who was never a good student but had the backing of her teachers and community. “Michigan in the sixties and seventies was deeply liberal, owing in part to a broad union-worker base. But also because our borders with Canada were porous, unlike now. Canadians were considered boring, but they somewhat influenced in Michigan a certain temperament – undemonstrative, intelligent, and fair-minded.” She remembers an environment that took the life of an artist seriously. Her education included stints at Cleveland Institute of Art, Kansas City Art Institute and Yale Norfolk, the latter having a big impact on her as an extraordinary summer of artistic freedom and experimentation. Later, she’d find time to sketch at historic NYC ateliers like the Art Students League and Spring Studios, which Braden remembers fondly for its serious figure drawing sessions.
Despite her apparent fondness for urban environments, Braden’s work elicits a nightmarish, city-as-hell-scape quality found in George Tooker’s claustrophobic paintings or David Lynch films like Eraserhead, with its surreal, industrial tableaus. Her process involves collaging bits of paper over watercolor paintings and pushing revisions as far as the surface allows. She glues on fresh, new figurative elements to brighten up the work, ensuring their attachment with a stack of heavy books. She might transfer the legs or arms from one painting to another through a process of borrowing and excavating. The muted matte surfaces of her works reinforce a sense of world-weary loneliness evoked by scenes of city life’s grim entrapments. Yet she leavens the dingier aspects of confined spaces with magical flourishes of cluttered interior design, patterned walls and furniture, charms, amulets, and glowing nets and armatures.
As to whether her people and places are composites of her own life experiences, Braden says: “I don’t know. I don’t know where the imagery comes from or what it involves, but after working on a piece for a while, I get a lock on it, there becomes a space I understand once it sits there for a while. Pieces go through a lot of reworking and layering, it gets ridiculous, why didn’t I arrive at this sooner?” However she gets there, she achieves something strange and truthful with her engrossing multimedia works. We can see bits of ourselves in her distinctly humanistic portrayals of agony and ecstasy.
Follow Libby Braden on Instagram @LibbyBraden5.
About the author: Patrick Neal will be an artist-in-residence at The Webb School, Knoxville, TN, during the winter of 2026. Recent exhibitions include In Bloom at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, Basel, Switzerland, and Pushing Boundaries at Garvey Simon Gallery, New York, NY, through October 12. Neal is a co-founder of Show&Tell, a lecture series at the New York Irish Center in Queens.
A really fine piece with ample heart about a quirkily dialed-in artist who produces small gems. To the kindred spirits of Braden’s that Neal astutely identifies, I’d add Daumier and Robert Crumb, Max Beckmann as to some of her drawing, and Guston with respect to her purposefully wan color and emotional tone.
Well presented description of this intriguing artist, her work, her living/work space and her nocturnal schedule. In a world that is focused on “bigger is better” and flashy videos of AI generated activity, I find it uplifting to see an artist doing what they do, and doing it well.
Thank you for this Patrick.