May 2026 Featured Artist
Artist Blends Perspectives Creating a Unique Juxtaposition
of the Outside World with Interior Spaces
An Interview with Brigid Kennedy
Brigid Kennedy
Self-Portrait / Courtesy: Brigid Kennedy |
Brigid Kennedy is a painter living in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Her degrees are from the University of Toronto (B.A.), SUNY Buffalo (BFA), and Yale University, School of Art (MFA).
Her work is included in the following collections: The Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo, NY); The New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT); Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY); and Trinity College (Hartford, CT). She has exhibited in museums, galleries, and other unique spaces: Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden (North Salem, NY), daphne:art gallery, (Litchfield, CT); Castellani Museum (Niagara Falls, NY); ArtWalk/Hartford Public Library (Hartford, CT); Five Points Gallery (Greenwich, CT), Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven, CT), to name a few. Group exhibitions include Kelly-McKenna Gallery, Kent Art Association; Carrie Haddad Gallery; Zurcher Gallery’s ‘100 Women of Spirit’; Silvermine Galleries ‘74th A-ONE Exhibition’; New Britain Museum of American Art Nor’Easter 2024; The Flinn Gallery; The Mattatuck Museum; Carriage Trade Gallery; Odetta Gallery; Prince Street Gallery; and The Painting Center. Brigid’s awards include Greater Hartford Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship Grant, Fulbright Scholar Lecture/Research Award in Chile, and Connecticut State Commission on the Arts. |
Sanctuary contributor Susan M. Rostan had the pleasure of interviewing Brigid, whose inside/outside paintings, obviously rooted in an exploration of perception, draws from observation of “the ephemeral and imperfect world hidden in plain sight,” offering a layered perspective that she began to explore at home, looking out her windows and observing both the outside world and the architectural elements of her interiors.
Since looking at your work resonates with me as an artist, I'm going to honor that and react to you as an artist, not just as a writer. Let's start with where you are right now and what's going on in your studio.
Since looking at your work resonates with me as an artist, I'm going to honor that and react to you as an artist, not just as a writer. Let's start with where you are right now and what's going on in your studio.
I've been working on this series of reflections, superimposing the natural environment onto the built environment. I find it really fascinating because I work from a photo I take, and the images are very challenging in terms of detail, layering, and multiple perspectives. And so I haven't, in any way, exhausted this approach, as I see it. Some of the places and many of the photos are from my home, and others are from visits to family or trips.
Dear March, Come In!
Title is after a poem by Emily Dickinson Oil, Acrylic, Graphite on Dura-Lar ~ 11 x 11 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
Little Long Pond Boathouse II
Oil, Acrylic, Graphite on Dura-Lar ~ 11 x 11 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
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You bring up some interesting questions, and I think they’re all connected — the surface that you work on as well as the scale.
The surface I work on is primarily Dura-Lar, an archival film. It's clear like an acetate. And I think it works very well with really enhancing the luminosity of color. That's one of the reasons why I chose to use it. My background is not painting; it was sculpture for decades. But along with the sculptures, I always drew and worked in gouache to explore ideas for sculptures. I was able to explore color in a much more intense way than I ever would with sculpture, so I use Dura-Lar, or sometimes Yupo, because they have the thickness of paper. I deliberately make relatively small work. I want more of an intimate one-on-one. That's very important to me, and to the attention the work gets or invites you to apply. The more you look, the more you see. I made the break from sculpture back in 2018 or 2019, when I was listening to the news a lot, a lot more than I do today. But the themes or message were similar in that a couple of things that were really on my mind were immigration and mental health. Size is very relative, but for me, they're pretty big. Six panels hanging, maybe three by four feet, floating, with about 18 inches between each one. And you can see through them in certain parts. So this was, for lack of a better term, maybe a kind of bridge piece, because it is an installation and paintings. Last year, I showed them at the Castellani Museum at Niagara University in Niagara Falls.
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The Quality of Mercy
Acrylic, Pen on Dura-Lar Polymer Film ~ Variable Sizes © Brigid Kennedy |
State of Play, Installation
Governor's Island, New York City (2015) Area Seen is Approximately 71 x 36 x 4 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
Interestingly, in your installations, the environment is part of your experience. So, in many ways, the current works pull from that kind of viewing perspective: focusing on this and that at the same time. Is that something that you've been aware of?
Well, I think I'm very aware of the architecture and the spatial depth and the layering. It's reframing the view that you're in a relationship with. You are entering into it through your visual experience, I think…I hope. It's a reflection back into yourself and what's immediate, what's around you as well as what's beyond. Am I capturing that accurately? Absolutely, yes. On some level, it's very simple: just this one moment, looking at this one scene. But through a glass window, the reflection shows you what's behind, something I couldn't see physically. It's that one moment that seems so simple and yet is very complex and deep. I think it resonates with certain ways of experiencing a moment — not exactly meditation, but a simplicity that has real depth. Whom would you identify as your influences? There are artists that I really love, like Fairfield Porter, Kerry James Marshall, and Alice Neel. I taught sculpture at Trinity College in Hartford for years, and when they asked me to teach a color class, an older painting professor told me, ‘You're a colorist. I don't know if you know that.’ That makes me laugh now because I am. When I stopped teaching, I was able to really focus on what I wanted to do. Now, I'm not trying to pretend that I'm the ultimate original. I'm just doing what I want. The images and photos I choose are quite challenging, and I really enjoy that. |
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Can you walk me through those moments of inspiration and what it is that drives that urge or need to create something?
For this series, I started with smaller paintings, and I decided that I wanted to work on capturing the atmospheric conditions of the weather. When was that? That was 2022. We live across from a park, and one morning I woke up really early. It was misty when I looked out the window. The dining room was behind me, the door was open, and I turned on the kitchen light. That rectangular patch of kitchen light was superimposed on what I saw in front of me. And that introduced itself to me as, ‘This is really cool, I need to do this.’ So that was one of my original thoughts: to try to capture the atmospheric quality of the weather and the night. And then you work from photographs? Yes. It gives me the composition and its vanishing point, and then I make changes. I'm looking for a lot of spatial depth and the overlapping. And then: What happens to the color when there's that overlapping? Or: What happens to these shapes? That's where the work begins to engage with abstraction, when you get these other things happening. |
Dawn I
Oil, Acrylic, Graphite on Yupo ~ 14 x 11 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
Freight Train II
Oil, Acrylic on Dura-Lar ~ 9 x 9 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
Closed
Oil, Acrylic on Dura-Lar ~ 9 x 9 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
I'm interested in how you became an artist. Were you involved in art as a child, or did it come to you later?
Well, my father was an attorney, and he was very interested in photography as a hobby. My mother painted. She was also an attorney, but she painted watercolors. We lived south of Buffalo, and she would go out in this class and paint barns out in the country. I remember going to art classes at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, about an hour away in Buffalo.
How old were you then?
I was about nine or 10. We later moved to Buffalo. And when I was in high school, I remember how my parents rented art from the Albright-Knox, and it was just so exciting. So that left a big impression on me. I also have an aunt who painted. She was an occupational therapist and a big influence when I was little. It was always about making things.
Well, my father was an attorney, and he was very interested in photography as a hobby. My mother painted. She was also an attorney, but she painted watercolors. We lived south of Buffalo, and she would go out in this class and paint barns out in the country. I remember going to art classes at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, about an hour away in Buffalo.
How old were you then?
I was about nine or 10. We later moved to Buffalo. And when I was in high school, I remember how my parents rented art from the Albright-Knox, and it was just so exciting. So that left a big impression on me. I also have an aunt who painted. She was an occupational therapist and a big influence when I was little. It was always about making things.
6 AM
Oil on Dura-Lar ~ 14 x 17 inches
© Brigid Kennedy
Oil on Dura-Lar ~ 14 x 17 inches
© Brigid Kennedy
And when you went to university, what were your intentions there?
Well, I went to the University of Toronto, where I earned a bachelor’s in philosophy. I took one art studio, and that did it. I focused on sculpture. I needed to be tethered to the real world. With philosophy, it's like a hot-air balloon that's taken off, and I needed to be working with my hands and with objects.
Well, I went to the University of Toronto, where I earned a bachelor’s in philosophy. I took one art studio, and that did it. I focused on sculpture. I needed to be tethered to the real world. With philosophy, it's like a hot-air balloon that's taken off, and I needed to be working with my hands and with objects.
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I went to SUNY Buffalo for my BFA and was very influenced by George Smith. He introduced me to the Dogon culture of Mali, West Africa, and I received a travel grant to visit West Africa. And that was a big influence on my career and practice for many, many years: the architecture of West Africa.
Architecture still maintains a presence in your work now. Yes. You bring the world and nature in, which is for many of us a soothing encounter, sometimes an awesome encounter with the energy of nature. I wonder how you find your own sanctuary? Coming into my studio and looking at an image that I'm going to try my best to paint. It's like unraveling a sweater and knitting it into something else. I have to deconstruct it, then put it back together with the tools that I have, which are paint. Do you ever find that you need a break from that, some time to be away from the studio, clear your head, so to speak? Yes, because it's intense. But, you know, I enjoy doing the framing while I'm waiting for something to dry. We went to Mexico in January, and I'm very excited about the images that I took there. |
Roma Norte II
Oil, Acrylic, Graphite on Yupo Synthetic Paper ~ 11 x 14 inches © Brigid Kennedy |
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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibition Now through June 7 The Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden “In Plain Sight” North Salem, New York Group Exhibition June 25 - July 30 Kelly-McKenna Gallery “Looking” (working title) Spring Lake, New Jersey |
Follow Brigid on:
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