How Denise Dambrackas Turned Vulnerability Into Fine Art

Denise Dambrackas spent years as a graphic designer before returning to painting, and she is refreshingly honest about why it took so long. Fine art meant exposing “unknown untrusted aspects” of herself. Graphic design offered “clear and measurable objectives.” One of those is a lot more comfortable than the other, and comfort, she finally decided, wasn’t the point.

What pulled her back, in part, was her husband, a cardiologist who somehow also found time to become a serious painter in midlife. His example of “vulnerability and bravery dissolved my excuses,” she says. She studied briefly at an atelier with master artist Anthony J. Ryder, then online during the pandemic, and the formal training in realist drawing gave her the confidence to finally put her work out into the world.

That work now includes Future Feminine, a series of figurative oil paintings that has become both her calling card and, she admits, a vehicle for her own self-discovery. These are not polite portraits. The girls in them are scowling, power-clashing, entirely unbothered by expectations. The seed was a 1950s magazine photo of a little girl “caught having a feral and private moment: one hand in a choke hold on a stuffed toy’s neck and the other losing the double scoop from her waffle cone.” The image lodged somewhere and wouldn’t leave. The series that grew from it, Denise says, gave her a way to paint girls who could express themselves “without those weighty feelings, and with pride.”

Her graphic design background shapes the work in ways that are impossible to miss and surprisingly hard to define. Realist brushwork butts up against hard-edged shapes and typography in combinations she describes as “pleasing to my eye.” Her process philosophy tracks the same way: gather everything, explore every direction, then edit ruthlessly. “Like good design, the goal is to make it look easy and show only the finished, polished result,” she says. “It’s like I’m discovering my intention through the process and then destroying the evidence.”

Denver is in the work too, even when the subject is a girl in a princess dress wielding a hockey stick. Denise moved here in 1998 and found a city that made room for her: underground music, First Fridays on Santa Fe, Denver Roller Derby (which she helped found), and a painters’ community built around master artists Quang Ho and Daniel Sprick. “It’s my experience here that has greatly affected who I am,” she says.

Her work is available at Abend Gallery in Denver’s Golden Triangle district, which is a fine place to meet a few of her girls face to face.

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