Charlotte Brainerd (1921 - 1995)

Charlotte Brainerd was a painter, printmaker and educator. She was a modernist and an intellectual. Although she is represented in many permanent collections, details of her life remain hidden. 

Charlotte Brainerd (nee Charlotte Blanche Mattison) was born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. She studied at the Walker Art Center School in Minneapolis (1942 - 1943 and 1946 - 1948) with instructors Mac Le Sueur and Evelyn Raymond. 

In the early 1950s, she emigrated to Vancouver and eventually enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art. She spent a year studying under Peter Aspell. In 1958 she moved to London, Ontario and taught at the H.B. Beal Technical and Commercial High School during the school year, and studied at Queen’s University Summer School under André Bieler during her summers off. In 1959 she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto.

Sometime in the early 1960s, she met and married Dr. Barron Brainerd, a mathematician teaching at the University of Toronto. Barron Brainerd was quiet, spoke 5 languages and was a practicing Buddhist.

In 1962 Charlotte accompanied her husband on a two-year mathematics fellowship to Canberra, Australia with a short trip to Japan. She exhibited in Australia and she is represented in the National Gallery of Australia’s permanent collection. Her abstract and symbolic work from this time was said to be widely influenced by her husband’s mathematical studies and Buddhist beliefs.

Charlotte worked in oils, acrylics, and collage, but she is best known for her etchings and aquatints. She played with allegory and symbolism in her work, as well as Oriental philosophy (for example, she produced a portfolio of seven etchings based on quotations from the Zen Master Huang Po). She embraced Geometric Abstraction and Modernism.

In the early 1970s Charlotte found work at the Madison Avenue School of Special Education teaching art therapy for disturbed children, and at was an art consultant at the Browndale youth program.

Curiously, she ceased to work and exhibit from 1973 onward.

There is very little information on Brainerd from 1973 until her death, however, it is rumoured that after losing a child, her marriage with Barron Brainerd fell apart and Charlotte stopped creating art. 

She relocated to Victoria, BC around 1987 and died there on March 28, 1995, at 74 years old. Source