Lauren Brevner rarely paints men.

“I’ve always painted women,” the Vancouver-born and -raised artist told the Straight in a phone interview.

As Brevner was about to set out on her career, she found a quote from Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist world-renowned for her self-portraits.

Kahlo said something along the lines of doing self-portraits because she knows herself best.

“So when I was starting out, I was like, ‘Well, I love art; I love being creative; I love painting—but I don’t know what to paint,’ ” Brevner said.

“And it seemed like, ‘Well, I’m a woman; I understand my perspective,’ and so it makes sense that I paint something that I know really well, which is women.”

Like Kahlo, who inspired Brevner’s career, the self-taught artist knows herself best.

But instead of self-portraits, she does emotive representations of women she admires as well as those she wished she had seen as a young girl.

“I’ve always idolized women who are really confident, really passionate and strong characters, and so I kind of paint my idealized self-portraits, I guess you could say,” Brevner said.

Further, she recalled growing up a shy girl. As an adult, she confesses to being “still very introverted”, someone who “never wanted to take up space”.

“I’ve always felt like I looked different, because I grew up in a predominantly white neighbourhood,” the artist—who is of Japanese, Black, and German heritage—said.

As a child, she didn’t see a lot of women of mixed roots. She now paints a lot of women who “look closer” to her own image. “I felt like I didn’t belong here because I couldn’t find people that were like me,” the artist said about her early years.

After high school, she went to Japan to try and connect with that part of herself.

“I’m Japanese Canadian or I’m Trinidadian Canadian or I’m German Canadian, but I’m not any of those things individually, and that’s another part of why I paint what I paint, because every time I meet another mixed person, you just have this connection,” Brevner said.

She noted that individuals of mixed racial origins get “access to a lot of different spaces” but at the same time “don’t really fit into any of them”.

Women on both sides of the family provide inspiration for her. She said that her maternal grandmother had a rough time growing up in Japan and that she was living in Canada when the Second World War broke out. Because of the war, her grandmother was interned and sent to the sugar-beet farms in Alberta.

“She had everything stripped from her,” Brevner said.

On her father’s side, her German grandmother married a Black man from the Caribbean island of Trinidad. The couple didn’t have it easy settling in Vancouver. Even finding an apartment was difficult, because many didn’t want to rent to mixed spouses.

“We’ve come from a lot of discrimination in Canada as people of colour, and so I look to them and I like to present works that would make them proud and honour my heritage in any way that I possibly can,” Brevner said.

Like those of Black ancestry and people of colour, Indigenous peoples also faced prejudice. In addition to her solo works, Brevner collaborates with Squamish artist James Harry.

The two did a mural as part of the ongoing Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Titled Rememory, the work features a woman flanked by two creatures. One is the now-extinct Salish Wool Dog, whose fur was used by Indigenous people on the West Coast to make blankets. The other is a shisa, Brevner said, which is a mythical Japanese lion-dog and usually depicted as a couple. Shisas sit outside temples in Okinawa, she explained, like welcoming spirits or watchers.

Brevner said the mural is a new work in her ongoing collaboration with Harry.

“It’s called weaving cultures, weaving spirits, and coming together and working together, and how that can be a different path toward reconciliation,” Brevner said.