Brita Granström

Born in 1969, Brita Granström is a Swedish painter and illustrator. Granström studied at Orebro Art School from 1988 to 1989 and then received her MFA from Konstfack, University College of Art & Design, Stockholm in 1994 which included a six-month semester at The Glasgow School of Art.

Granström's first solo exhibition took place at the University Gallery in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 2000. Following this, Granström was selected by Quentin Blake to be one of 13 touring artists between 2001 and 2002.
 Granström has since held numerous solo exhibitions of her work at galleries such as Kings Place Gallery in London, the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, Gallagher & Turner in Newcastle and Tanner & Lawson in London. Granström has been the recipient of many awards for her work as a children's illustrator, including multiple wins of the English Association Award throughout her career. Her work is held in private and public collections around the world. Mother of Four (2011) was acquired by Ruth Borchard Collection in 2011.

Brita Granström is a painter of both portraits and landscapes. Much of her work revolves around women who have allowed her to observe and capture their private moments, with Granström's ambition being to articulate 'flesh and light', otherwise described by William Varley as 'carpe diem' painting, which seizes the private moment before it vanishes. Both Nordic and British landscapes feature heavily in Granström's work, with her interest similarly being in moments of flux and changing weather in order to celebrate the themes of hope, humanity and mortality.

Mother of Four was painted in Sweden and shows the artist in a three-tiered dress of opaque green, blue and red, standing taut and upright as her arms strain upwards to hang a white linen sheet out to dry; her look, turned towards the viewer. The self-portrait engages with perceptions of domesticity and motherhood, while also capturing the fairytale magic of the woods around her. The fluid arboreal shapes projected onto the pristine sheet she holds may be seen as a subtle poetic allusion to the branching out of the family tree - celebrating the lives of her four sons.