Still Life Digesting - The Art of Mia Brownell
by Kris Sisbarro

“Keep pace with the evolution of your own imagination” - words to live by from local Artist and Professor, Mia Brownell. Each year, she advises her students to keep reaching and growing in their craft and themselves. She is also the embodiment of her own advice.

Brownell always knew that she wanted to be an artist and began studying her craft at the young age of 14. With the full support of her mother (a successful sculptor herself) and her father (a man of science), Brownell was accepted to an arts high school in Baltimore. She started as many young artists do – with typical academic still life paintings in conjunction with typical high school academics. She gives a lot of credit to her parents for being extremely supportive and creative people who encouraged those traits in herself as well as her siblings. She also had the advantage of seeing her mother struggle to succeed in a career that traditionally was not held by a woman. Brownell believes that she has more support in the art world than her mother did thirty years ago, but there is still more work to be done. She attributes much of that to the women’s movement and affirmative action. In our own SCSU Art Department there are 3 female studio art faculty out of 12. But, on a more optimistic note, Brownell would informally report that more than 50% of her students are female.

Still Life with Grapes

It was during her studies at Carnegie Mellon that she began to delve into what she now mainly focuses on – food. It’s more than just your ordinary still life, though. Brownell’s paintings make you stand back and think – truly think – about what we are doing to ourselves. She says that her interest is in the “act of eating, the elaborate intersection of food and bodies, culture and ourselves.” Looking at one of her favorite works, “Dinner for One, My Olestra Fantasy,” may make one a bit queasy and not just because of the brightly colored intestines. With rich, flat, acid colors and dramatic compositions, Brownell wants us to be aware of what we are putting into our bodies and what that might do to our bodies. Our society’s overwhelming concern with body image and body identity disconnect us from some of the most basic universal human functions. “[Her] paintings refer to a consumer society, its overindulgence and its inability to see the body as more than a hungry machine to be fed...It is an alienation that doesn’t even possess the whole body, but must suffer its anguish in small doses.” (Huntington, Buffalo News, 10/12/97) She has recently begun to work with manipulations of food at a more molecular level – grapes as DNA strands or apricots twisted in amino acid twists and turns. Consumerism has pushed the agricultural industry to begin to use biochemicals to engineer bigger and better foods. But, as Brownell’s paintings help to point out, are they really better for us? By eliminating the exterior of the body, Brownell paints what is universal. Digestive systems and molecular structure are universal to all humans - crossing racial, gender, and religious boundaries. She says, “It’s a way of painting the body without painting the figure.”

Still life with Apricots

If you would like to see more of her fascinating twists and turns to the still life, you can see her work at the Samson Fine Arts Gallery on Fifth Ave in NY, NY. Or if you are in Madison, WI you can visit her work at the Kingsfoot Gallery. She is an active member of the Visual Arts Committee for ArtsSpace in New Haven. This committee meets every other week to organize exhibitions in ArtSpace. She has also collaborated and coordinated SCSU’s participation in City-Wide Open Studios, a program “whose mission is to catalyze artistic effort, connect artists, audiences and resources, and redefine spaces.” This is Brownell’s second year in collaboration with City-Wide Open Spaces and she is happy to report that approximately thirty SCSU students represented their work during the two week event.

For more information please visit City Wide Open Studios’ website at www.cwos.org