Summer Sass

Summer Sass meets the viewer with bold confidence and a flash of playful defiance. The oversized sunglasses, vivid lips, and lifted gaze create a portrait that feels self-possessed, expressive, and fully aware of its own presence.

Warm gold, magenta, deep plum, and orange move across the face and surrounding abstraction, while layered patterns, hearts, and a butterfly add movement and symbolic depth. The composition carries the feeling of summer light and personal freedom, but beneath the glamour is a stronger emotional current: a figure choosing how she is seen.

As a contemporary portrait painting, the work explores identity, confidence, transformation, and the performance of self. The figure becomes more than a stylish face. She suggests the layered ways people protect, reveal, and express who they are.

Created through layered abstraction, intuitive mark-making, and figurative realism, Summer Sass reflects Kimberly Brayman’s larger body of psychological portraiture. In this mixed media portrait, beauty, attitude, and vulnerability exist together, allowing the figure to emerge as both subject and symbol.

Details
36 x 36 x 1.5 inches
Mixed Media on Canvas