Behold the Bruner woman.

Her voluptuous body spills out of her garish clothes. Her sneaky eyes dart above a toothy grin that stretches from ear to ear. She hasn't had a good hair day in decades.

Cringe before her, but not until you've guffawed first.

Who is this colorful freak?

"I see these people everywhere," says Vicki Bruner, who is showing her mixed-media paintings at Quirk Gallery. For almost three decades she's had every-other-year solo shows at White Canvas Gallery and the now-defunct Cudahy's Gallery.

"They're exaggerations of people I deal with every day of my life."

Bruner, blond and gym-fit at 58, is just the opposite of the figures she depicts.

She pulls a neat switch on cartoonists, who often give animals human characteristics.

She makes humans look like animals.

"I have a very twisted way of looking at the world and a very sick sense of humor, at least in some people's eyes if not in my own," Bruner acknowledges. She's chatting in her rambling Jackson Ward loft as her blue Great Dane, Fibi, snoozes nearby.

"One usually doesn't know what's on these people's minds," she continues. "Some people who have the nicest smiles may be up to the most devious pursuits. That doesn't say much for our human race, does it?"

Across the way, a zebra, stuffed by a taxidermist long ago, stands sentinel over the kitchen. A life-size sculpture of an alligator bellies toward the door leading to the roof garden.

"I do like people," Bruner insists, "but I like animals better. Animals are true to themselves, and so many people aren't. I give humans animal characteristics because we're all animals."

The Bruner woman -- and, by extension, the Bruner man -- has been around for decades.

She's been a staple of Bruner's painting since the artist un-learned many of the art lessons she was taught while collecting an art degree at the University of Iowa.

She shows up in Bruner's soft sculptures.

Her image is known around the world from the approximately 200 Broad Appeal greeting cards that Bruner has created and marketed with a text-writing partner.

Bruner was born in Oceanside, Calif., and attended a dozen schools across the United States as a "Marine brat."

"Art was all I ever did," she recalls. "I started drawing and painting as a child. I loved to draw chickens. I was a weird kid. I was crazy about baby chickens."

Her interest in chickens continued.

"I bought one of Vicki's chicken paintings," says Helen Levinson, who represented Bruner as the director of Cudahy's and White Canvas. "It's a wonderful painting of a chicken on a throne with a crown and an ermine robe.

"It's on my kitchen wall opposite the door where I come in. No matter how down in the dumps I may be, it always gives me a lift. Just the title, 'Chicken a la King,' makes me laugh. Vicki has a great talent for drawing, but, number one, she has a terrific sense of humor laced with irony."

Bruner began selling her work at outdoor art shows when she was 15, and she's never stopped.

"I loved to do caricatures, but that wasn't considered fine art at the University of Iowa," she says. "I switched to very large, very loose oil paintings at Iowa, but the love of caricature stayed in my blood."

She's experimented in other styles.

The Quirk show is evenly divided between traditional Bruner images and a recent departure into small and heavily collaged paintings on wood panels that present figures that are half-animal and half-human.

Last year, she launched into nonfigurative painting for a spell.

"I wanted to stretch myself, but I got so bored," she says. "The upshot of painting figuratively, for me, was my discovery that I could paint and drink wine at the same time."

She always returns to caricaturelike images and freely acknowledges that they straddle the fence between fine art and illustration.

"I'll never get away from this style," she says. "Trust me. I've tried."

On the rebound from a divorce and with her two children out of the nest, Bruner moved to Richmond three years ago from Virginia Beach to be part of a large art community.

One thing that hasn't changed is her seemingly fire-sale prices, which range from $575 to $1,700 at Quirk.

"I've managed to stay in this business all my life by keeping my prices reasonable," she says. "I price my work to sell. If I priced my paintings at $10,000, I'd just be biting myself in the butt.

"Some artists have a false sense of entitlement. They think that because they're making all this fabulous art -- fabulous at least in their own minds -- they're entitled to fabulous prices.

"But then the work doesn't sell. They have to get regular jobs. I've never had to do that."

Bruner is represented by galleries in Austin, Texas, and Asheville, N.C., as well as Quirk.
Roy Proctor, a freelance writer and theater director, retired in 2004 as the art and theater writer for The Times-Dispatch. He can be reached at royproctor@aol.com.