Brittany Weaver

Brittany Weaver was born into an art family.  Her father is a sculptor; her mother is a graphic designer; and two older siblings are both artists.  She spent many hours after school observing and helping her father at his bronze foundry.  “I didn’t play with Barbies as a kid.  I played with life-size bronze figures.” Never having considered another career, she began working with her father right out of high school.  She earned a BFA in sculpture with a minor in art history and now has 20 years of hands-on foundry experience. 

“Bronze starts out with inherent beauty, so it can be intimidating to begin controlling the oxidation process of patination,” she observes. During many years of demanding and exacting patina work for numerous sculptors in her father’s foundry, Weaver has mastered not only that aspect of bronze sculpture, but has become adept at forging and fabricating her own sculptures, and doing something many sculptors outsource, all the patina work. Being inspired by the material itself, she starts by arranging and rearranging pieces of sheet bronze until she finds a composition that pleases her.  After she welds the components together, the final step is patination—adding color. “This for me is still the tricky bit. The patina color can make or break a piece, so it is important to take my time with this critical step to make sure I get it right.” 

“I have used just about every art material under the sun—paint, plaster, glass, fabric, paper, clay and so on, but there is something about metal.  It gives me a sense of power being able to manipulate such a hard material, and there is a great appeal in making sculpture that will be on this earth long past my death.”  Brittany is not attempting to make any statement with her sculptures.  She seeks only to make the world a little more beautiful and a little more colorful.  “It’s not just about the composition and the joy of color. If I can make a viewer feel something, I have done my job.”