People's Choice Award 2025
People's Choice Award 2025
Meet the artist
Brigit Krans is a full-time, professional oil and watercolor painter based in the Champlain Islands of Vermont. Originally from The Netherlands, Brigit grew up surrounded by waterways and countryside—enduring symbols of home that continue to inform her artistic work and practice. After two decades living abroad across multiple continents, she settled in New England, where she experiences the region’s landscapes, lakes, and marine life through a renewed lens.
Brigit’s work has been met with critical and public acclaim. She won the 2025 People’s Choice Award with her painting ‘Bright Light - The Red Barn’ in a regional exhibition in New York and curated her solo exhibition featuring 28 paintings in Vermont. Brigit has exhibited throughout New England and her work is in private collections in the US, Canada and Europe. Her artistic journey and body of work have been highlighted in a three-page article in a Dutch newspaper, underscoring her growing recognition across both her native and adopted homelands.
Landscape painting has endured not because it simply records what the land looks like, but because it asks what it means to stand somewhere and be aware of it. A landscape is never neutral. It carries time, labor, memory, weather, and human presence—whether visible or implied. Even when figures are absent, the land bears traces of how it has been used, altered, loved, or ignored. To paint a landscape is to choose a point of view, a distance, a moment, and a mood, and those choices quietly reveal values: what is worth noticing, what is allowed to remain unresolved, what is framed and what is left out.
Painting the Landscape
“For me, landscape painting is a mirror rather than a description. I return to land and water because they offer a way to think about scale, belonging, and impermanence. A landscape can hold emotion without narrative and meaning without explanation.”