Brom notes that she previously had painted portraits of women standing at windows—notably in her nod to Wuthering Heights in “Cathy’s Ghost at Heathcliff’s Window.” These paintings draw from Victorian and Edwardian imagery. “I felt like I had explored that, and that was more expected of me,” she says.
In the midst of a long photo session with art model Olive Glass, Brom noticed the floral dress through a window, laying on a pool table. “That bright, psychedelic thing was just screaming at me,” she says. The reference photos came at the end of the day, just “one more thing” that she wanted to try out with the model. “Immediately, it seemed to work somehow,” she says. “Between Olive being very natural and knowing what I’m trying to do and me having a really clear vision in my head that just hit me.”
She spent about four months painting these images. “What I love is attacking a painting as a puzzle,” she says. “I generally start without a drawing underneath and I just start painting. To me painting is most interesting that way.”
Brom continues, “We all have our own processes, but for me it keeps my mind stimulated to look at it as puzzle pieces. So, a lot of the time, things get super abstract to me as I’m painting them.”
That process lent itself to effects like the rain against the window. “The crazy visual effect that you can get there with the rain and the psychedelic patterns really excited me,” she says. “I loved figuring out that puzzle of how to make the rain work.”
What I love is attacking a painting as a puzzle.”