Kathleen Brennan

Born in New England, Kathleen Brennan lives in the rural White Mountains and Lakes Region of New Hampshire. This natural environment provides Kathleen with endless opportunities to draw the landscape as she hikes, bikes, and canoes to remote destinations. She explains, “I am looking to capture the ephemeral zone where forces come together – sensing where sky, ground and water meet, softly coaxing light and shadow out of the collision of forces.” These drawings then become distilled in the studio where she seeks to create conceivable visual similes of our human condition as experienced through the vast sublimity of the natural world: such conditions as contraction vs. expansion, the interaction between edge and area, and indefinite merging. These conditions giving clues to felt experiences like being held or contained, expressions of silence or chaos, or the sensation of being suspended in an airy firmament. The interaction and relationship of form become an important part of the image’s interior life by participating and penetrating into the tonal hues and their materiality, which gives the work its incarnation and human impression.

Using a palette of black and white, Kathleen romantically pushes a quality of light, tonality and space that activates and unifies the forms transporting us into a more consummate reality. Her work exists as a reverie, an amorphous recognition, like an early morning haze over the landscape, gently shifting and changing shape, where borders cease definition and mysteries unfold.