KALLISTO TRANSFORMING INTO A BEAR – BEAUTY INTO BEAST Print

BIOGRAPHY STATEMENT Woman. Oppressed. Victimized. Enslaved. Circumcised. Sold. Chattel. Shockingly, these are the words for how a woman is described in different parts of our world in 2015. Female. Empowered. Dominant. Passion. Beauty. Intimacy. These are but some of the words one might use to describe the oil paintings of M.G. AshenBrenner. This self-taught artist, living near the shores of a rural lake in British Columbia, Canada (home of the 2010 Winter Olympics) is proud to present pieces from her two original collections – 50 Shades and Lovers of Zeus – on Saatchi Art – after the collections’ successful premiere at Art! Vancouver 2015. These two collections, though separated by countless centuries, are joined together through a marriage of ebony and colour in a masterful contrast of sensuality and intimacy from both today and the ancient worlds. 50 Shades is the trilogy of today. Bold raven black foundations blended into 50 different shades, charged with flashes of scarlet red, capture the beauty and sexuality of the human form. In contrast, but in unity, Lovers of Zeus is ancient antiquity. The pieces of this collection are powerful, they impose, they dominate, as did this unrivalled King of all Greek Gods. M.G. AshenBrenner combines a lifetime studying the traditional painting techniques of the masters with the contemporary ease of 2015. A calling from deep inside of her draws M.G. AshenBrenner to explore with her brush the female subject captured in the shadows of the day and of the night and of the dawn and of the dusk. The female. Inspired from the darker works of Rembrandt, but from today. Not passive. Powerful. Sensual. In control. Beautiful. In the 2015 movie release, Woman in Gold, Helen Mirren retells the story of Maria Altmann‘s decade long struggle to right the wrongful taking of her family’s Gustav Klimt painting. As did Klimt in his use of gold leaf, gold, silver and copper leaf are incorporated into M.G. AshenBrenner’s canvases, the oils are brushed and layered over top, and as the light of the room changes with the hours of the day, from dawn to dusk to candle light and then to dawn again, movement, depth and dimension are skillfully created. In 50 Shades, her brush strokes successfully force the black ebony pigments to birth depth and dimension through blending and shading, through light upon dark.