Christine Brenner
A childhood of invented games with my two creative sisters in the woods and farms of 1950s Ohio nurtured an early synthesis of the imagined and the apparent which shapes my work today.
Years of formal art education (BFA, Cooper Union, 1972) in New York City gave me the tools and a heightened awareness of the landscape. I am drawn to a view by the feeling it elicits.
There is a clear division between my studio work and Plein air work. Both are primarily concerned with the landscape; usually within times of transition from darkness to light, light to darkness. I am interested in the range of emotions triggered by the ephemeral and the evanescent: dusk and dawn, fog, shooting stars. My subjects are usually rural Vermont, the coast of Maine, and the Italian landscape: olive groves, villages, and the bosco (small forest). Also, I have been working on a collection of pieces noting the phase of the moon in its marking of time.
The graphically simpler work of the studio is related to the intense, distilled quality of a poem. The Plein air work, usually completed in one frenetic sitting, is a more spontaneous and immediate response to the physical world.