The Gallery @ Barr Photographics announces the holiday installment of the Corner Gallery’s 2018 exhibition series

The Gallery @ Barr Photographics announces the holiday installment of the Corner Gallery’s 2018 exhibition series, with a debut exhibit of photo realistic acrylic paintings by Brenda Mask.  Brenda is an emerging artist, hailing from Texas by way of Knoxville Tennessee, whose bold and fresh exhibit is entitled “Be Who You Want To Be”.

Brenda was born in Trinity, Texas but raised in Fairfield Texas. Brenda reveals in her biographical sketch, “Fairfield is in Southeastern Texas, between the David Crockett and Sam Houston National Forests.  When I grew up there, it was a little one horse town of about three thousand people that had only one stoplight, and I don’t know why it had that one.” She grew up a small town girl, graduated high school, got married and settled down to raise a family.  After the birth of her four children she began to feed her fascination with images using the photography medium.  During that time in Texas, Brenda’s life got upended.  She divorced and in 1991 she visited the Great Smokey Mountain National Park for the first time.  After falling in love with Tennessee, she moved to Oak Ridge where she eventually became a freelance photographer for the Oak Ridge Newspaper where she photographed local sports and dignitaries at the Oak Ridge National Lab. She found love again, remarried and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee. Having dabbled in art early in life, she resumed painting after being inspired by a friend from Arkansas, who paints mostly landscapes and uses oils, Brenda though,  was never inspired to create landscapes but is drawn to painting people using acrylics.

In her Artist’s Statement, Brenda reveals “I am the model for most of these works of art.  Because, as her favorite artist, Frida Kahlo, once said, ‘I am the person I know best’.”   Brenda further reveals, “I set up a photo shoot in my studio, do self portraits and then draw and paint the images!  All I need to do for inspiration is open my closet! My bold and fresh Retro Chic images are mostly headless, which is the inspiration for the theme of the show, ‘Be Who You Want To Be’. The paintings could be anyone.  They could be you”.  

“Be Who You Want To Be” will be celebrated with a holiday gala reception and art talk by Brenda Mask, to which the public is cordially, invited, on Friday, 14 December from 7 - 9:00 PM, in The Gallery @ Barr Photographics, 152 E. Main Street, Abingdon, Virginia.  “Be Who You Want To Be” will hang, and be offered for sale, through 31, January 2019.   The Gallery @ Barr Photographics is housed in the Greenway Trigg Building, located in the heart of Abingdon’s main street historic district.  Please call 276- 628-1486 or visit http://barrphotographics.com for further information.

Photo #1: “Party’s Over”, acrylic by Brenda Mask

Photo #2: “Sweetaholic Girl”, acrylic by Brenda Mask