Brianna Allen uses color, texture and design to create a visceral likeness in her paintings.  She pulls between quick gesture drawing and precise in-studio study until they both coexist together to reveal new way to experience the landscape.

These landscape pieces are mixed media oil paintings.  They all begin as plein air studies with on-site focuses in composition and value by using oil sticks and a limited paint palate.  Before leaving the site Brianna notes visual cues, of which held her focus;

“Mountains pale, a sparseness to them.”  “Clouds help to pattern the shadows.”  “Tide is out going, revealing a golden green edge to the land.”  “The water morphs from intense blue-green to a warm cerulean as the wind skips across the surface.”

In studio, Brianna refers to the notes as a way to plug back into the sense of place.  Using oils, graphite, permanent marker, frottage, collage, engraving, stamps, stencils, spray paint, metallic powder and a variety of mediums she manipulates the landscape as she fundamentally sensed it.

Brianna received her Bachelors in Studio Art and Entrepreneurial Studies, and her Bachelors in Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from the University of Southern Maine in 2007.  She has also studied at the National Latvian Academy of Art in Riga, Latvia.  In 2008, her passion for adventure and painting brought her to Homer for the summer, while she painted portraits of nightlife vigilantes.  She has lived in Homer since 2009, and still remembers the first day she walked into the Bunnell Street Arts Center.

This body of work is dedicated to this organization’s heart and vision for deeply enriching the Homer art community in which it serves.  Homer would not have been my home for so long, if it were not for the Bunnell Street Arts Center.