Mia Bruce
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Mia Bruce paints from places most people avoid. Her work stays close to discomfort, using raw texture and urgent color to trace what the body remembers. Figures shift between states — exposed, guarded, undone. Symbols repeat across pieces, not as answers, but as openings. There’s no fixed plan, only a need to respond in the moment. What builds on the canvas feels more like a confession than a composition. Each painting becomes a kind of reckoning — slow, personal, and unfinished on purpose.
Q: Your work is raw but never overexposed. What draws the line for you?
A: My works all individually have their criteria of exposure. Some pieces are tackling a difficult situation and thus call for an overcomplication of form, texture, and color—exposing the more abrasive, dysfunctional attributes of my psyche. At the same time, certain pieces are more vague and methodical in approach because the subject isn’t mindful of chaos. These pieces expose my deeper crevices I would rather leave alone, but confront due to the necessity of growth. Each piece calls for a degree of transparency and vulnerability. On the artist’s part, I have to be emotionally and spiritually equipped to share, or else the piece will have no emotional weight. Anatomically speaking, my work is more of a dissection of the inner man, rather than a revelation of the outer man. I organize my symbols and figures to be interpreted in a deeper sense rather than for a higher shock value.
Q: In "Humor" and "Taken Advantage Of", the emotion hits fast. What pulls you into a moment like that?
A: Specifically, those pieces were created in one sitting. The weightier works of mine were often done in an emotional frenzy. I believe this process of being one with the canvas in that moment of internal struggle provides the completed work with an emotional weight unbeknownst to a methodically planned artwork.
The completed piece may look rushed, jagged, unproportional, and ugly… but it’s most relatable with our imperfect qualities.
These pieces tend to hold a nearer and dearer place in my heart than works that were created in a more sterile and serious mindset of perfection or healing inner infections.
Q: You’ve called painting a spiritual process. What keeps that grounded while you work?
A: I often reference the Bible in my artwork and poetry. Keeping my artwork in tune with my testimony as a forgiven heathen is the utmost priority. Because I have been forgiven of much, I desire to gift my Savior the work of my hands—not laboring for an earthly purpose, but rather laboring because He’s called us all for a Heavenly purpose. As humans, we have our shortcomings to perfection; thus, art is my means to depict the soul’s conflicts and resolutions.
Q: You return to symbols—eyes, mouths, hands. What keeps them speaking?
A: I reference those symbols across many of my works because each work provides the symbol with a different context. The commonality of these symbols also provides a commentary into the universal unsaid thoughts and emotions of the human psyche. Disconnection and dissonance will only be among us unless we challenge ourselves to open up and be vulnerable. Common symbols such as the eyes, mouths, and hands are congruent with us and thus provide the audience with identification in the piece. I recycle certain concepts to broaden a limitless discussion found within our souls. The discussion is the topic of eternity. There are so many meanings that lie within each of those symbols, I’ll never be able to give a perfect pictorial description of them.
Q: "My Body Screams" feels like a fight between presence and escape. What holds it together?
A: In "My Body Screams", there is a figure of yellow within the confines of flesh, nerves, and bones.
This figure of yellow is a depiction of the soul. The soul remains even when flesh and bone have deteriorated. For now, the soul is warred upon by the flesh’s wants and needs. There is a longing for escape from my human skin.
But in prayer, the presence of God overwhelms my flesh. Within the realm of my soul, I find sanctuary with Christ, who disarms the flesh and brings escape from this disaster-prone body.
Q: Your color choices feel more emotional than logical. What decides the palette?
A: My palettes are curated for each piece by my immediate emotional state then. I believe color is the meat of an art piece because you can’t enjoy the full substantial content of the theme without it. Color can numb or empower. It has the power to give and to take. Color restores and infects. There’s no logical explanation for why I choose my colors the way I do—I just draw what I feel. There’s an intuitive sense between emotion and color, and I would be doing a disservice to the artwork by forcing a palette for aesthetic purposes over emotional purposes.
