Brenda Isenberg

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I have an attraction to realism and abstracted story lines. I look for how surface patterns reveal structure. When I was four years old, I began attending performances of New York City Ballet, and that made me cognitively wired for the modern classicism of George Balanchine's leotard ballets more than other kinds of dance. These frequent experiences at State Theatre are my most powerful influence in setting up my initial criteria for what is art. I think my fascination with getting to a place in my painting where reality and extreme abstraction become one and the same, such as the agitated water in Daycamp, and my impulse to discard narrative detail (Joe on Ochre) was early on written into my aesthetic .

I alternate between thinking very formally, such as how my fields of color are affecting each other, as well as engaging in a hunt for the patterns of nature's designs, and paying attention to my expressive concerns. Color is exceedingly important to me. I spend a long time on many of my paintings; one of the reasons for this is that the optical magic I love requires a continuous re-balancing of cools, warms, values, and hues before a sustainable sizzle happens - I am on a quest for color that the eye doesn't tire of. It has been when I paint people and bodies of water that the exploration of color and design has been most thrilling to me. Water is very tantalizing to paint as the structural pattern is often initially elusive.

Being so steeped in classicism from my earliest aesthetic experiences and having reinforced that with a MFA from the New York Academy of Art, the figure, when I paint it, rarely feels right unless I discard extraneous detail. Until recently, this has been a barrier. I love expansive, gorgeous art with crusty textures, as well as contemplative, austere works with perfect color pitch. Some of my recent work exploring plant life, minerals, gems, rocks, and other forms, feels like fertile ground for a junction of body and environment. The outlandish gorgeousness and qualities of some recent subject matter constitute the essence as much as with the figure but also liberate me to form new conceptual models without the result being cognitive dissonance. (Go tohttp://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile//14577.html to view some of these works.)


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