she describes as "wayward" and "free fall."Les Femmes Folles. Interview: Phyllis Bramson, Artist, Les Femmes Folles, 2015. Retrieved May 15, 2018. "My studio is a place for bricolage. It's roiling with stuff in bins, on shelves, on the floor. The putting together of this stuff is basically is a mystery to me," she has said. Her work can be divided into three main bodies: sculptural and mixed media work (1970s); mixed-media paintings and bas reliefs (1980– ); and three-dimensional works (2006– ). Influences Bramson assimilates eccentric, diverse social and visual influences. She acknowledges the pull of 1950s conventions of duty, sacrifice and propriety, describing herself as a kind of tourist or voyeur "teetering" between the worlds of her free-spirited, "anything goes" studio life and straight, married suburban life.Westerbeck, Colin. "Phyllis Bramson," Artforum, Summer 1986, p. 131. Those dichotomies inform the paradoxes noted in her work: sweetness and salaciousness, modesty and exhibitionism, kitsch and art, East and West, disappointment and hope, longing and pleasure. Aesthetically, she draws from richly visual, wide-ranging sources. Her attraction to pattern, beauty and sensuality was formed by youthful experiences in her home of Chinoiserie (the Western decorative imitation of East Asian artistic traditions), kitsch objects, and 1950s girlie magazines and calendars. Later inspirations range from Rococo art to the outsider paintings of Henry Darger to the historical tradition of Persian miniatures and pleasure gardens. Bramson relates strongly to what she calls Chicago's "history of independent artmaking." Both she and critics have noted her shared interest in expressive figuration and theatrical spaces with the city's "Monster Roster" artists of the 1950s, such as Robert Barnes, Ellen Lanyon and Irving Petlin (sometimes called "Magic Realists"), Seymour Rosofsky, and June Leaf.Adrian, Dennis. "Phyllis Bramson: 1973–1986," Phyllis Bramson: 1973–1986, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Critics also note similarities to the more well-known Chicago Imagists, in her work's immediacy, vernacular references and unnerving poetics, but generally conclude that it differs in its more personal, lyrical, dream-like and inward orientation. Bramson describes herself as bridging the groups: "I have the humor and salaciousness of some of the Imagists, but I want my figure to have a certain reality to it. I don't take too many liberties." Themes According to the late critic James Yood, "Bramson has pursued what seems an inexhaustible exploration of the inexhaustible wonder of human coupling, its forms, its rituals, its absurdities, its essential and