Brie Adkins

Muralist, artist, and advocate, Brie Adkins is passionate about creating vibrant rural communities and bringing awareness to wildlife conservation. Her work stretches beyond the canvas and onto walls within the community.

Adkins’ work is rich with intentional symbolism, guided by an ongoing search for meaning across lore, myth, medicine, and the knowledge hidden in everyday elements.

Like many artists, she is a night owl. She finds herself stargazing, admiring the moon, sitting in her greenhouse and watching shadows shift—focusing on light, noticing how it moves across leaves. She’s drawn to the stillness and mystery of the night sky. When she does finally go to bed, she carries a full mind into vivid dreams.

In the studio, she often spends as much time sitting with a painting as she does working on it—reading it, studying it, waiting for the moment when the feeling she’s been reaching for finally meets her gaze.

Many of her pieces reflect this nocturnal rhythm—night scenes filled with stars, mystery, and warm candlelight. As she notes, “Really looking at it now, even in my most recently painted day scenes, the figures are sleeping with their eyes closed.”

As a self-employed artist in a small town, Adkins’ practice has reinforced—again and again—that it’s okay to be different. Her work has taught her to double down on her essence, trusting that what matters most is whether she likes the work she’s making.

She feels most connected to something larger than herself when painting murals, knowing the work permeates the community in positive and uplifting ways.

Adkins is currently unlearning the idea that more is better.

“More mediums, more shows, more social media, more products—while that helped me grow and learn, in recent years I’ve found that less truly is more. As I prepare for a house move, I’m working toward downsizing my studio to the bare bones, giving the work more room to breathe and allowing myself to focus on what really matters.”