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ABOUT THE ARTIST:
MARILYNN MALLORY BRANDENBURGER
 Artist Marilynn Brandenburger has been painting and exhibiting her artwork professionally for more than twenty-five years. The many awards and recognition given her during her painting career include grants from private and public foundations, appointments as Artist-in Residence in national and state parks, and Signature status in the Colored Pencil Society of America. Her work is in collections throughout the U.S., including the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Gainesville College, Glacier National Park, the Hollywood Museum of Art, Isle Royale National Park, and Tyee Asset Strategies of Seattle.
Her drawings and paintings have appeared in national newspaper and magazine articles and her artwork is featured in two books, The Best of Colored Pencil 5 and The Island Within Us. Marilynn has also illustrated three books, including two in natural science, her primary interest.
Marilynn's images come from 20 years of sketching and photographing the beauty of nature all over the U.S. Her artwork generally takes two forms: medium- to large-scale landscape paintings and smaller, more intimate studies of nature's detail. She also paints still life, using items from her personal collections or, most recently, hand-crafted objects from the studios of artists and craftsmen.
Marilynn has been working primarily in colored pencil and watercolor for many years, but has recently added oil pastel -- a versatile painting medium first developed in Paris for Pablo Picasso -- to her painting repertoire.
A native of the Midwest, Marilynn has lived in the South for more than thirty years. She holds a Bachelors degree in anthropology from Tulane University and a Masters degree in art education, with a concentration in Drawing and Painting, from Florida Atlantic University. She is also a graduate of Harvard's Institute for the Management of Lifelong Education.
Marilynn also teaches drawing and painting to adults in Atlanta and the Southeast. A schedule of her current classes can be found at www.spruillarts.org and www.folkschool.org.
Marilynn's work can be seen by appointment at her studio in Decatur, Georgia,
at the Georgia Artist's Registry in the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, and
elsewhere on the online
gallery of this website.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT ABOUT HER ARTWORK
I have been painting landscapes for more than 25 years. The land - especially wilderness -- continues to be an important source of inspiration for me as I celebrate the beauty I find in it through my drawings and paintings. Recently, however my landscape paintings have taken a new turn. Realizing that time is short and that I won't be able to paint as much of the American landscape as I dream of painting, I have begun focusing my attention on a few special places: the Southern Appalachian mountains, the Lake Superior shore and the Florida Gulf Coast.
I've been painting landscapes of Appalachia since I moved to the South in 1980.
The images for my paintings of mountain landscapes and flowers come from hiking
the Appalachian Trail and teaching at Appalachia's well-known John C. Campbell
Folk School. I first started painting landscapes of the Lake Superior shore when
I was Artist-in-Residence at Isle Royale National Park in 1997. The lake's pristine
waters, breathtaking coastlines and lush woodlands provided heavenly inpiration
for painting, and I now go to the area every summer to paint. During winters,
I head for the beaches of the Florida Panhandle where I paint a quite different,
but equally inspiring semi-tropical landscape.
In addition to landscape, I am excited by light and form. The Appalachian mountains, Lake Superior shore and Florida Gulf Coast have that in abundance, as their unpolluted skies and waters reflect amazingly clear, bright light on natural forms. But I am also entranced by the light on objects, particularly those objects that are part of the world I know best, the creative environment. My most recent still life painting series, "Studio Meditations," explores light and form in artists' studios. The first paintings in this series are poems dedicated to the lovely forms of pottery and paper. Subsequent paintings will be meditations on light and form found in and around the studios of woodworkers, papermakers, glassblowers, printmakers, etc., and other painters. I feel as if this is an exploration that will occupy the rest of my life.
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