About Dawn Brennan
I grew up in the Midwest and got my education in painting and other things at the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Chicago. I have been teaching and exhibiting in and around Chicago since 1999. I am very grateful to have received grants from the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois.
Everything I paint is based on what is seen. I try to understand the mystery of the seen world, the world of surface, of appearance. It is all we have.
Following are some of my favorite quotations that help articulate my thoughts about responding visually to the world.
- "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible."
- Oscar Wilde
- "The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac."
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- "I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."
- Max Beckmann
- "The technique of art is tod make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."
- Victor Shklovsky
My Current Work
The landscapes I'm currently painting are made up-I think. They seem to be painting themselves, and I don't know if they come to me because I have already been to those places and I'm just remembering it, or because I am there right now.
Perhaps they come from some part of my brain I don't know about. They make me think of my childhood paint-by-numbers, childhood books about other planets, and the unworldly world of the American West.
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