Brinkman is a Wisconsin native. Born in Milwaukee in 1960, she has lived both in cities and rural areas. After high school she hit the road, with more prolonged stays in Fort Lauderdale, Cape May, and Los Angeles. Jonna came to art late, but her involvement with it (beginning in the Spring of 1992) is deep and all-consuming. Art became for her a way to discover the self from which she had been running away during the years between high school and her return to college in 1991. She quickly discovered that there were few pleasures that matched that of putting paint on paper and canvas, and her love for paint impelled her to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where she was awarded both the prestigious Edward Ryerson Award for Painting and a BFA) and then on to Pratt Institute in New York City, where she completed her MFA. In her work, Jonna has been exploring where she stands in relation both to American and European Modernism and Post-Modernism and her desire to express her feelings about the natural world around her is always balanced by her sheer delight in the physicality of the paint and the joys of putting it onto surfaces. Brinkman says that when people look at her works, she wants them to see the power of nature as a force in opposition to the materialism of people, including painters who relish—as she does!—the materiality of their medium: "My painting is about color, gesture and markmaking, growing from a certain energy that flows from the weather and nature's largeness compared to the smallness of mankind. It is a very emotional psychological process for me. I like to keep the reality of the work in sync with the physicality of the process. Sometimes you can get hysterics and harmony all in the same painting; I don't often plan the painting before it happens, it's something that just has to appear."

On 9/11/01, Jonna Rae Brinkman woke up and tried to make a call on her cell phone. Getting no signal, she decided to go up to the roof of her Brooklyn studio across the river from the World Trade Center. She reached the roof just as the second plane hit and, being an artist, she did the only thing she could: she began painting. For the next three weeks, when she wasn't walking over to the site, she painted, trying to make sense of what she saw. In 2004, haunted by the ghosts of 9/11 and by some more personal ghosts, Brinkman returned to Wisconsin, where her father lay dying of cancer in a hospice center. Spending as much time as she could with him forced her to think more about mortality: her city's, her familiy's, and her own. Thinking, to an artist, mostly means painting, and she threw herself into painting, mostly small oils on canvas and on paper. Shortly after her return home, she went into a cornfield to paint a landscape and saw the burning towers of the World Trade Center still. Over the past three years she has been struggling to regain the ability to see not only what was in her mind's eye but also what was in front of her.

Although Brinkman had experimented with both dry and oil pastels, most of her recent work has been done in either oil or acrylic paint with washes. Spaightwood has been showing Brinkman’s work for nearly six years, and in that time we have sold over one hundred of her works: there is clearly something about her paintings that reaches out to viewers and pulls them in, and, not infrequently, pulls them back for more. Brimful of talent, Jonna Rae Brinkman is clearly an artist to watch.