Brayden Gardner is curious about the world and about people. With each work of art, the 16-year-old Boerne High School student explains, “I just want that connection with others through the piece.”
She at least made a connection with the judges at the 2023 Visual Arts Scholastic Event. Brayden won two Gold Seal awards for pieces she painted, the highest award given at the annual Texas Art Education Association each year. The works present a mix of childhood innocence and grownup pressure, subjects that are surely apropos for the soon-to-be high school junior. The paintings also relate to each other as they tell similar stories from different perspectives: one is a self-portrait, and the other is her little sister.
“A Bed of Thorns Where Roses Lie” depicts Brayden laying in a bed of white roses. Her eyes are closed and her arms are raised, with one hand pierced by a flower’s barb. “It's about society’s standard of beauty,” she says. She and some of her friends have had negative encounters with those standards, so she chose the topic because she wants others who have had similar experiences to feel seen.
Her other award-winning piece “Way Back When” shows her little sister — goofy, wild, and unrestrained. The upside-down pair of sunglasses adorning her sister’s head? Brayden says that’s symbolic of how we’re more able to be comfortable being imperfect as children before the pressures of society set in. “It represents how when we're little, we have this comfort in our mistakes. We have so much room to change and grow, and I kind of miss that.”
More changing and growing is on the horizon for Brayden as she looks ahead to her next year of school. She loves art but doesn’t think she wants to make a career out of it. “When you do art professionally, you always have a deadline, and then it kind of turns something you love doing into work. Since I love doing art, I don't want that to happen.”
She’ll keep drawing and painting for sure, but she’s planning to take stretch herself in the future with classes that you might not expect for an art and theater enthusiast: engineering and forensic science. As she embraces the uncertainty of the next few years, she says she’s motivated by the question, “If you've never done something, how do you know that it's not your thing?”
Her mother Denise knew art was Brayden’s thing even at an early age. She tells a story about taking a trip when Brayden was just two years old. “We were on a plane and they used to give you those cookies that are in the shape of a plane. And I looked at a picture she drew, and it was that I noticed it was the plane. It looked just like the cookie, and I'm like, ‘That's it. She's got it.’” Mom and Dad continued to encourage Brayden to develop her skills, even if it was sometimes out of exasperation. “She was a very rambunctious kid. So if we can get her to sit down, that was the only thing we can get her to do, to sit down and just chill,” Denise says chuckling.
Denise and Brayden’s father Brandon both have made careers in dentistry, but they are artists too. Dad gravitates toward abstract compositions full of color, while Mom prefers black and white pencil drawing. Brayden, she says, has a combination of both their styles but is able to create in a way that’s beyond what her parents can do. “I've done portrait work, and it's so intricate, and it just takes so long. She'll just do it in a week,” Denise muses. “She just has the best of us.”
Even though she won two top awards, Brayden doesn’t want to stop growing. Her two champion pieces were actually some of her first forays into painting with oils. She’s drawn with pencils from an early age, and later added watercolors to her repertoire. She got a taste of life as a professional artist by doing commissions based on photos clients wanted to be turned into paintings. She’s also beginning to play with photography, an interest that began with taking pictures to use as references for her painting.
In every medium, Brayden wants her art to tell a story that connects to her audience. Usually, she has a story in mind when she begins to work on a piece, but the inspiration may come from anywhere. “Being able to take something you see in the world and make something new out of it is just really cool to me.” For one composition entitled “The Gardener,” she says she wanted to relate a story she heard at church about God pruning and shaping us out of love. The model for the gardener though? “We were on a field trip at an art museum, and I just took a random picture of a guy looking at a painting,” she says with a laugh.
Her faith is a common theme in Brayden’s work. As is her family. As are her life experiences. She says she draws on these themes because they allow her viewers to relate to her and each other. “I want people to be able to connect to one of my pieces and feel validated in what they may have felt in the past or feel heard about something that they may have felt,” she says.
With all her curiosity and the unknowns in her own future, Brayden says it’s a question of connection that drives her: “What did I leave here today? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Because all that’s going to be left of you in the world when you're gone is what you did and how you made people feel.”
“Being able to take something you see in the world and make something new out of it is just really cool to me.”