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.
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.