Biography
Brenda Giegerich paints vividly colored landscapes, that are imaginary, abstract, highly personal, and visually engaging. Using a vocabulary of trees, pathways, rocks, and water, she creates places that are lonely but beautiful, dream-like and emotional. In Giegerich’s often nocturnal images viewers will encounter enchanted, strange, yet somehow familiar psychic geographies.
Brenda Giegerich was born in 1949 in Kansas City, MO, but grew up in Westport, CT. As a child, Giegerich was deeply involved with art and shared her love of drawing and painting with her mother, who was an artist. She studied art at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, where her work reflected her interest in figurative Expressionist painting. She had a particular appreciation of early Expressionists painters such as Munch and Nolde and was attracted to the post-Impressionists’ use of color. She also cites Matisse and Picasso as major influences, the former especially for his use of vibrant color, and the later for his fertile visual invention. The work of both painters can be seen in Giegerich’s own sense of abstraction, deploying large colored forms to create her painted landscapes.
After college, Giegerich lived and painted in San Francisco, then moved to Boston where she studied at Lesley College, receiving a Masters in Education in 1975. Seven year later, she moved to New Mexico where she revisited her love of representational painting in still lifes, landscapes, and figures, all with her strong feeling for color. In the mid 80's, Giegerich began painting very large abstract canvases, noting painters such as de Kooning and Kline as inspiration. She showed these gestural works widely during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, she studied with Helen Frankenthaler, whose presence can be felt in Giegerich’s painterly fields, intuitively created by pouring thinned-down pigment, layering transparent color, and scraping away paint to reveal a new surface of color and texture. Also during this time she began making monoprints and studied with Garner Tullis in 1992. Printmaking, with it's use of layering, has influenced the direct physical processes that are central to Giegerich's current paintings. In 1995, Giegerich adopted her daughter and two years later moved back to Westport, CT, where she currently lives and works. She began drawing her daughter in pen and ink and ink washes, which resulted in a series of thinly painted, strongly colored images of children at play. The immediacy of the painting and the transparency of the images lead directly to the ongoing series of vibrant landscapes that Giegerich began in 2005.
Giegerich has shown her work widely in solo and two-person shows, including those at the Stamford Art Center and at the Festival Gallery in Santa Fe, and in group shows including those at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT and at the Santa Fe Art Institute.
– John Mendelsohn
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