Dawn Brennan

Email: djbrennan@aol.com
Hyde Park Art Center Website: http://www.hydeparkart.org/alist/profile/brennan_dj/

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. To help develop my career, I have received CAAP grants and Illinois Arts Council Special Assistance Program grants. This May my portrait of August Spies, one of the Haymarket martyrs, will be part of a City of Chicago Public Art installation along the Lower Wacker Drive Riverwalk.

Interview

Dawn Brennan’s ArtStyle Blog interview by Darrell Roberts was published in June, 2007.

Gallery / Exhibitions

Selected Recent Shows:
Chicago Looks, Chicago Riverwalk Public Art Project, Chicago, Illinois, May, 2008
The Way of a Woman, ARC Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2007
Harper College, Palatine, Illinois, 2007
Constellation, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2007
Evanston Art Center Faculty Show, Evanston, Illinois, 2007
Five Artists’ Recent Works, ARC Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2007
Body, Grace, and the American Hero, Page Brothers Building, Chicago, Illinois, 2006
30th Annual Plaza Art Show, Beverly Arts Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2006
Women of Chicago, CCT Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2006
Something to Do with Failure, Moser Performing Arts Center Gallery, Joliet, Illinois, 2006

Artist Statement

“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

“Realism” is no more realistic than abstraction -- it is just the way in which I try to understand what I see. And the longer and closer I look at the world the more mysterious, strange and unreal it appears. All my artwork is based on trying to see, and in much of my work that is all that’s going on.

My deep interest in the theme of idealization comes directly from my interest in the real. We make meaning of the real through idealization. Like art itself, idealization is, as Picasso says, “a lie that tells the truth.” It is impossible to create perfect types, and yet we do it over and over again. What I find most compelling is the point where that ideal creation goes wrong. Much of my figurative work has been based on over-mediated video images of ideal male and female heroes from Classic Hollywood Westerns and Bible epics -- ideal types that seem naive and outdated. Exploring the flawed nature of idealization has made me confront aging, authority, sexual and racial stereotypes, fantasy, the heroic figure and the mythic American landscape.

Subscribe to updates: