Brody artworks: top left: Self Portrait (2020), watercolor on paper, 8.5″ x 11″; top centre: Diego (2020), watercolor on paper, 8.5″ x 11″; top right: Malia (2020) watercolor on paper, 8.5″ x 11″; bottom left: Pearl in a Hat (2020) watercolor on paper, 8.5″ x 11″; bottom right Malia and Anum (2020), watercolor on paper, 8″ x 11″.The first thought I had when looking at Hanna Brody’s recent watercolour portraits was that they require something not always credited in the act of representation: a deep, sustained generosity. To conjure such ephemeral emotional states with this level of clarity suggests a rare kind of observational intimacy. Already an assured portraitist, Brody’s recent works reveal a growing preoccupation with impermanence, the shifting, fugitive textures of human feeling.
Each double portrait functions as both image and echo: a watercolour painting and its monoprint, pulled directly from the painted surface. Known primarily for her work in oil, Brody’s use of water media here introduces a heightened urgency. The paint dries fast. You can feel the immediacy of the gesture, the constraint of time pressing through each line. Despite the lightness of touch, there is weight. The faces she captures do not pose. They pause. They flicker.
What’s most striking is the artist’s attunement. You can tell Brody is looking with care, not just at faces, but through them. Traditional portraiture often relies on a subject staying still, an arrangement that flattens expression into endurance. These, by contrast, are made from observational sketches gathered in the fractured rituals of pandemic life, video chats, digital screenshots, fleeting glimpses of those closest to her. It is no coincidence that repetition appears elsewhere in her work, especially in studies that read like visual timelapses, where a subject is rendered again and again across emotional registers.
The mirror effect of the monoprinting feels particularly significant. In psychotherapy, mirroring is a technique used to validate experience and reflect the self back to a subject as a gateway to further discovery. Brody’s mirrored portraits offer something similarly potent. They do not flatten. They resonate. Recognition occurs not through likeness but through doubling, through the delicate interplay between presence and reflection. The result is not simply a pair of images, but a kind of emotional triangulation between artist, subject, and viewer.
That these works emerged from lockdown adds to their poignancy. They do not seek to overcome distance. They sit with it. They allow for absence. And in that space, they offer a quiet and persistent form of connection.
About the artist: Hanna Brody is a Brooklyn-based artist. Her art mirrors the emotional states of the people she’s surrounded by and temporal impermanence. Find her work at hannabrody.com and follow @hbrods for more.
About the writer: Jennifer Mawby is a contemporary artist and sometimes curator and art writer with a focus on projects for artists using accessible language. Jennifer is the co-founder and director of Vantage Art Projects. Her work can be found here: www.jjtmstudio.com and on Instagram: @jenniferjeanmawby.
*Carpendale, M. (2006). Kutenai Art Therapy Institute Manual. (pp. 45-60).