Pamela Braun originally from San Antonio, Texas motivated by the prodigious rainforest environment immigrated to Belize in 1990 to paint natural spaces that are being extinguished in the Americas. The universality of her art is rooted in nature. Believing that when art is true, it is one with nature, the secret of primitive art. Guillermo Gutierrez Nieto author of Belize Art Panorama of the Arts in Belize , Ediciones Pleamar, Mex,2001 says about Pamela,
" Her principal expression medium is painting utilizing mostly oil, she also works with mixed materials and with huge spaces painting murals.
A quick look to her works could suggest to us only reproductions of something obvious in this country. Nevertheless, if we watching them with detail, we can discover a thorough technical process which ends in a perennial vividness reflected in the natural elements that she integrates.
The mixed works of Pamela Braun have implicit one of the dilemma that most of the artists affront, the social compromise. In that sense, through the pieces of old newspapers , Braun invokes the deep difference between the natural harmony and the villainess of some human acts. Maybe for this reason, the works are a kind of call toward the improvement of our spiritual health if we look again to the nature."
Dona Quixote, Pamela Braun
I speak w/out concern for the accusations
that I am too much or too little woman
that I am too black or too white
or too much myself
and through my lips come the voices
of the ghosts of our ancestors
living and moving among us
female, a Quixote is no Quixote at all; told about a
woman, the tale of being caught in a fantasy becomes
the story of everyday life.
Poem by Audre Lorde
Dona Quixote, Pamela Braun
During a time of constantly reworking meaning, this image was used as a metaphor for my inward spiral during voluntary expatriation while I sought information from a culture outside of my own and was moving against barriers that stood in my way of becoming a painter. The windmills were the barriers of thought and experience that I revolted against in contemporary western society and its social and economic structures.