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Excerpt from the Catalogue Essay "Ambiguous Nature: Mia Brownell's Paintings"
by Donald Kuspit

"...I am suggesting that Brownell's paintings resonate with Old Master allusions--a traditional iconographic and stylistic richness that adds to their depth and meaningfulness--and metaphysical import. But they are also abstract, indeed, I venture to say a sort of Abstract Expressionism, for each grape functions as an idiosyncratic gesture, and the linear vines epitomize the all-over movement--relentless dynamic--that informs the most thoroughly expressionistic abstract painting. Brownell has invented a unique, convincing way to synthesize Old Master realism and Modern Master abstraction--and make a metaphysical as well as social point by doing so. Both have become historical, academic, and even decadent, but the artistic future belongs to those who can find innovative ways of integrating them, so that each revitalizes the other. It is the postmodern task, as many critics and theorists have argued. Brownell is one of the few young artists who intuitively understands this, which is why her paintings--at once crisp and poignant--give one hope for the future of art, all the more so because they show that painting is far from dead, and perhaps even more importantly that beauty is still possible in art, and can still be discovered in nature. Indeed, Brownell reminds us that it is innate to natural form if not to art, which is why ars pictura natura remains Brownell's motto, however much our understanding of nature has changed since antiquity--however much we have understood the basic abstract form of flourishing organic life, a flourishing form that Brownell's art rapturously represents, even worships."

Donald Kuspit is an American art critic, poet, and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was formerly the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (1991-1997). He received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism in 1983

View Exhibition Catalogue:
http://bigorbitgallery.org/bigorbit/bog/pastimage/brownell/brownell_catalog.pdf

Still Life with Chicken Villin Headpiece

2006
Oil on Canvas
40x40 inches

Still Life with Pear and Grape VII

2005
Oil on Canvas
54x64 inches

Still Life with Villin Headpiece

2006
Oil on Canvas
72x96 inches

Still Life with Flu

2006
Oil on Canvas
56x50 inches

Still Life with Pear, Plum and Grape IX

2005
Oil on Canvas
98x78 inches

Still Life with Double Double

2006
Oil on Canvas
72x54 inches

Still Life with Sympathy for Eve (Prelude)

2007
Oil on Canvas
30x48 inches

Still Life with Cock (Currin)

2007
Oil on Canvas
16x20 inches