Commentary
We live lives that are dream life and waking life, mythic and real, all at the same time. This is the truth that artists always teach us, from the sacred landscapes of the Australian Aboriginal painters to the enchanted mindscapes of Paul Klee. The splendid artifice of contemporary life distracts us from the wonders of the depths of our own lives. But art persists to remind us.
The art of Brenda Giegerich immerses us in landscapes dense with color. Often nocturnal, these paintings are both imagined but visually insistent. They suggest the images that arise in dreaming and survive into the daylight. They do not pretend to depict a scene from the world, but rather they map an inner domain of feeling.
Boldly painted, Giegerich’s work depends on the presence of large masses, arrayed like characters on a stage. These trees, mounds, pools, and skies make repeated appearances, changing color and form, placement and significance. Like personages, the trees independently stand alone, lean close, reach out, and form gateways to the vistas beyond. These trees are regularly found close to water, which may run in a stream, form a pool, or rise ominously to inundate their trunks. The water seems both natural and a sign of the psyche, always moving, always making itself known, rising from underground, threatening to overwhelm if denied. The mounds are mysterious, resembling boulders, hills, eggs, or burial mounds, but they seem reassuring, rather than foreboding, and as half a sphere, suggest cosmic perfection halfway achieved.
Giegerich paints her world in vivid hues, made more vibrant by the layering of pigment that is often partially scraped away to reveal the colors below. This process animates the scene, providing a charged visual energy, while giving the trees, mounds, and water a lightness that dissolves into transparency. Moreover, with this direct approach, the viewer is allowed to witness the process of creation, and see Giegerich’s world coming into being before our eyes. Forms are found, relationships between them established and revised, colors are layered, then layered again, while serendipity plays its crucial role.
Finally, in these paintings we arrive at a place that is hard to describe, but easy to apprehend. Under a dark sky filled with stars, night blooming flowers glow, and trees stand guard. The water rises and the crosses of a cemetery sparkle in the distance, but in this place, so raw and clear, we begin to appreciate a feeling of hard-won happiness.
– John Mendelsohn
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