Process & Practice

As a mature female artist Bren has the experience of life to challenge assumptions about youth, beauty and conventional attractiveness.
Regularly offering a close view of the face she uses  disguise, altered scale, unusual colour or fragmented form to demonstrate that portraiture is not merely a record of appearance.
Using abstraction or exaggeration her portraits move beyond a conventional likeness.
Her faces can suggest a lifetime without necessarily narrating every event.
Often emotionally charged and moved beyond photographic realism, distorted  proportions, layered surfaces and broken outlines can convey a recollection more effectively than a precise portrayal.

Working in later life has perhaps provided Bren with greater freedom, allowing her to revisit subjects, techniques and identities, not rejecting beauty altogether but broadening the meaning by including imperfection and lived experience.

Brens art education began with a BA(Hons) degree at the University of Hull. She has exhibited her work widely in U.K. galleries and is represented in ArtUK.

She works from her studio in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire where she continues to exhibit and develop her unique style of haunting portraiture and figurative painting.