Mary Breneman’s intimate landscape and still life paintings blend elements of representation, abstraction, and the artists own emotional expression. Through her gestural brushstrokes, she not only conveys the physical presence of her hand on the canvas, but also her personal experience of witnessing the scene. In rendering landscape, Breneman subtly abstracts her palette, utilizing complementary and analogous colors to conjure both balance and a dynamic tension. Taking queue from early American modernists like Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, Breneman simplifies and essentializes the trees, hills, and fields of her work into abstracted and, at times, graphic forms. Her planar subjects and color fields are tempered by Breneman’s loose, expressive brushwork. Each mark is imbued with energy and emotion, vestigial elements of the artist’s instinctive process. Despite the flattening of perspectives, her work remains compositionally rich as the eye finds direction and visual delight in every stroke of a tree, sky or hill.
Previously an art director and a storyboard artist in the advertising industry, as well as a decorative painter and muralist for many years, Breneman’s life has been immersed in and led by art. As she neared 50, she made the decision to invest in herself fully as a fine art painter, selling her worldly possessions and moving to San Miguel de Allende, an artistically lush city in Mexico’s central highlands. She started her own gallery there, and lived an artist’s dream, painting and selling her work for sixteen years. Her paintings during this era were widely collected and celebrated for their vibrance and representation of Mexican culture and landscape. When family called her back to the East Coast in 2013, she settled in Hudson, New York. Though at first artistically disoriented by moving from the technicolor dreamscape of San Miguel de Allende to the more cerebral and subtle quietude of the Hudson Valley, Breneman found her stride through her long walks through the enchanting nature and fleeting seasons of the area. During these jaunts, she photographs and sketches her surroundings, and, when she returns to her studio, she studies these photographs and sketches, using them as structural blueprints to create her paintings. “The paintings need to call the shots,” Breneman says as she describes her process in which memory and emotion inform the formal aspects of her work. She is far more interested in probing the emotional depth and expressive possibilities of color and form, rather than rendering some fleeting exactitude of nature. The resulting expressive landscape and still life works embody the Breneman’s curiosity and passion for the world around her.
Mary Breneman was born in Westchester County, New York. After spending time studying painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Art Students League of New York, Breneman had a successful career in advertising and, later, in the decorative arts. She owned and operated the Mary Breneman Gallery in La Fabrica Aurora, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico from 1998 through 2013 and was also involved in the Omo Gallery and Zoho Gallery there. Since her return to the United States, she has had both solo and group exhibitions throughout New England, as well as in Mexico. Solo exhibitions include those at Tori Jones Studio, Block Island, RI; Darcy Simpson Artworks, Hudson, NY; Nicole Vidor Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Mixta Gallery, San Miguel de Allende Mexico. Group exhibitions include those at Spencertown Art Academy, Spencertown, NY; Green St Gallery, Hudson, NY; Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA; Puerto Vallarta Galleria, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; and lnstituto Estatal De la Cultural, Guanajuato, Mexico. Mary Breneman lives and works in Hudson, New York.