Brent has exhibited widely, including her solo exhibition Seep, Spill, Grow, at The Danforth Art Museum, featured in Artscope Magazine, and her recent exhibits Inspired by The Sublime at Suffolk University Gallery and Beautiful Mess at Kelly Stelling Contemporary. Brent was featured as a 2016 Best of Boston artist by The Improper Bostonian and received the Fay Chandler Emerging Artist Award the same year. A Walter Feldman Fellowship culminated in an exhibit at the Walter Feldman Gallery in Boston, titled Primal Garden, which received critical acclaim. Reviews of her numerous exhibitions have appeared in “Artscope Magazine,” “Art New England,” “The Boston Globe,” “Sculpture Magazine” and other publications. Her work is in the permanent collections of Danforth Art Museum/School, Liquitex Corporation, and in numerous private collections. Born in Hadley, NY, Sarah Meyers Brent received her BFA from Skidmore College, her Post- Baccalaureate in Studio Art from Brandeis University, and her MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire. The artist maintains a studio at Waltham Mills Artist Association in Waltham, MA.
Artist Statement:
My painting, sculpture and installation take the craziness of motherhood and environmental destruction to create something beautiful.
In my large paintings, I am drawn to the wilt and decay of dried flowers and am constantly amazed at how they are able to maintain such beauty. The twisted, gnarled mass of floral vegetation mimics what I think about while painting. Smaller works, that I created directly from the landscape during the pandemic, record the unsettled beauty during this time.
My paintings represent gardens that are strong and layered, able to grow, come apart, and then come together again during the process. I’m drawn to the physicality of paint. I work to preserve the rawness of the canvas and my original drawing by combining areas of thick and thin. In some pieces washes fluidly explode out from the center of the canvas with globs of “paint flowers” growing on top. In others, it appears as if the painting itself is dripping and falling down. In all my works the compositions are simultaneously blooming and breaking apart.
Although I record my observations of dried flowers, I also leave a lot to chance. At times I place paintings on the floor, allowing the paint to be thin and fluid. Other times I work on them upside down, seeking out abstract form. I go back and forth between my desire to make the floral imagery more life-like and then to deconstruct it.
My sculptures and installations use all of the debris from my house and studio, including old kids’ clothes, paint globs, packing peanuts, rags, pieces of old projects, and gloves. There is a beautiful richness to these materials, which are otherwise considered trash. I want the work to feel alive: simultaneously growing and decaying.
Catalogue Text from the Primal Garden “Walter Feldman Fellowship”
By: Katherine French
“Flowers are dangerous subjects for painters. In the wrong hands, they are cloyingly sweet or blatantly sexual. They recall a kind of feminine delicacy that belies tough-mindedness. They avoid swagger and strut. We do not expect to be challenged by paintings that reference flowers, but artist Sarah Meyers Brent is quick to set us straight. In her mysterious gardens of growth and decay, we see evidence of hard intellect. There is nothing overly pretty about gnarled and twisted roots, or in the ooze of rotting plants. But Brent transforms decomposing muck into a thing of beauty, convincing us of her ability to make paintings that are sublime.”….
… “Brent invites viewers to a visionary garden, but then leads us past its deceptive tranquility to explore primal fear, anxiety, and joy—all the basic components of an emotional life that inspires us to look beyond ourselves.”
