Brenda J Pressnall was born in the rural mid-west in the early 1960s; tart cherry pies, root cellars, and porch swings. Where even truck stops served good homemade food. Surrounded by vast tracts of corn and soy fields, she searched tilled land for arrowheads in towns named after the native americans that had been run out a century earlier.
She grew up in a time when art was taught in public schools and even children in disadvantaged small towns were exposed to techniques like linoleum block printing, balsa wood construction, tile mosaic and painting. She tried everything and loved it all.
She left home at seventeen and put herself through college studying agricultural, later working in Washington DC as a satellite imagery analyst for the government until complications from a near drowning forced her to retire.
Unable to read, write or walk, Brenda rediscovered art. She picked up a paintbrush; splattering, streaking, and globbing paint onto canvas. Her initial paintings were crude and thematically personal. This rediscovery of art wasn't easy for her. It was painful and emotionally wrenching. It was therapy, a lifeline out of depression and an outlet for communication.
Searching for a simpler pace and return to small-town life, Brenda moved with her wife to Loveland, Colorado. Living within traveling distance of Sante Fe, Taos, Abiquiu and Rocky Mountain National Park, allowed her to develop and hone an artistic style shaped by images of the west.
Her paintings are influenced by a variety of artists. Scholder and Nieto, flavored with a bit of cinematic-style magical realism. As well as O'Keeffe and Theibaud, reimagined using bolder and more vivid colors. Her recent study of Hans Hofmann's techniques have jolted her out of her comfort zone and taken her art into new dimensions.
Brenda has created a body of work that pushes beyond any expectation of any one style and focuses instead on theme (both personal and socially relevant) and her approach to contrasting colors. She hopes her art inspires people to look at every day objects and experiences differently, to feel something about a piece that isn't on the canvas or within the frame but is implied by the way the work is painted or photographed, and to blur distinctions between what we see and what we imagine.
Brenda Pressnall joined Pixels.com Licensing on March 12th, 2011.
