In 2022, Bronwyn Dierssen was invited to a wedding — not as a guest but as an artist.
Although she’s been an artsy (and a self-described nerdy) person her whole life, she had around eight years of charcoal experience under her belt when she received an email.
“She was like, ‘Hey, I have this crazy idea,’” Dierssen recalls. The bride asked if Dierssen could draw charcoal portraits of her wedding guests — all 75 of them.
In the last few years, live paintings at weddings have taken TikTok by storm. When people started asking Dierssen for live art, she didn’t even realize it was a thing.
This is an unfinished portrait that Bronwyn Dierssen created at a wedding in 2022 as part of a guestbook.
Here's the problem: Dierssen can spend hours upon hours drawing a single portrait. But at a wedding, there's a time limit. There's the pressure of the muse watching her as she draws the curls in their hair and the smile on their face.
Before the big day arrived, Dierssen spent hours practicing, drawing with a timer ticking, filling up four different sketchbooks with drawings of random people she found on the internet.
Dierssen is flexible with the commissions she takes on, especially for live events. But at this particular wedding, she spent about 15 minutes with each guest or couple, sketching them as they sat in front of her (and finishing the portraits when she got back to her studio).
After sketching portraits with wedding guests for 15 minutes, Bronwyn Dierssen finished the drawings in her studio. This is a progress shot of one of the portraits.
She used the portraits to put together a very special guestbook for the newlyweds — her artwork sits right next to the guests’ best wishes written out for the bride and groom. It's something the couple looks back on frequently, tearing up as they flip through the pages.
“For me, at home, I just listen to music and I’m dancing and I’m in my own world. There’s no pressure — maybe if I say I want to get this done by this time, but it’s a lot more free,” Dierssen says.
“Celebrating people being in love — it’s a different atmosphere, it’s very uplifting, everyone’s in a good mood,” she says. “It’s different in the fact that you know you’re doing something for someone that’s going to mean so much and you’re doing that in that moment.”
Bronwyn Dierssen created live drawings of guests at a wedding held at the Tucson Museum of Art in 2022.
‘I get to recreate people’s best days’
Dierssen moved to Tucson when she was almost 20 years old, when her mother-in-law was sick.
“As far as creating something, it just wasn’t really happening at that point,” she says.
Dierssen also struggled with her health and when she became pregnant with her daughter, the problems only heightened. She was on bed rest, in and out of hospitals.
“Your mind is just going a million miles a minute, just thinking what’s the worst scenario going to be,” she says. “And then I got my sketchbook out.”
Before she knew it, five hours had passed — five hours without stress, five hours without a panic attack.
“(Drawing) was really the one thing that helped me get through, especially the last trimester,” she says.
When her daughter was born, she continued to dedicate her time to art, putting more and more into it as years went by.
“For the last few years, health is what brought me into the art world,” she says. “It’s still a struggle, but it does provide a lot of inspiration for me.”
Bronwyn Dierssen is a charcoal artist who also dabbles in oil paint and murals.
While she mostly focuses on charcoal, Dierssen also uses oil paints and is dabbling in murals, including two at The Low Down, formerly The Drunken Chicken, on Fourth Avenue. Her art tends to focus on health, identity, culture and emotion.
“The vision is really expressing the emotion, a moment in time, a feeling,” she says. “I do a lot of self portraits — I think that helps get a lot of frustrations, or what I’m feeling at the moment, out. It’s kind of like a purge.”
Some of her art has also been described as ethereal because it can look a bit undone — “because aren’t we all a little undone?” Dierssen says.
Dierssen has drawn commissions of people, pets and moments. She once was commissioned to draw a portrait of a woman before and after her double mastectomy “to honor the person she was, but also the beauty of who she is now.”
“It’s so meaningful to that person. They’re sending a photo of their favorite person or favorite pet and it’s their favorite moment of them — at the beach with family they haven’t seen in five years or a pet before it passed,” she says. “For me, to recreate that for them is such an honor. I take that responsibility very seriously and I want my clients to see something and be blown away, like, ‘I can look at the portrait on the wall and my dog is here with me,’ or ‘I’m back with my family.’
“I get to recreate people’s best days.”
Beyond traditional portraits, artist Bronwyn Dierssen can also create caricature-style images.
One of the reasons Dierssen loves drawing at live events is because people can watch her create — and see that it’s something they can do, too. “I wasn’t this good eight years ago,” she says. “It gave me purpose. I have really bad anxiety. It’s something that shuts my brain off.”
She likes letting people into her creative process, sharing a bit of her knowledge and giving them a behind-the-scenes peek at what goes into her artwork. A few guests from the wedding last year even told her that they dabble in drawing, too. She's stayed in contact with a few — they send her images of their own art journeys and she gets to watch them grow.
Her love for art bleeds into her relationship with her now 8-year-old daughter. Dierssen shares art with her, practicing with charcoal, paints and crafts like sewing.
“It gave me so much joy as a kid to have (art) be, kind of, like what got me out of a bad time. It's for her to have a skillset that brings her happiness and (for her to say) I put in the time and work and look what I made.”
To get in touch with Bronwyn Dierssen, visit her website. Packages for live events start at $500 and depend on factors like size, medium and time.
