As part of the Art in Public Places 2012 Acclaimed Artist Series Purchase Initiative, my painting The Narrow Gate #1, has been selected by the Regional Buying Committee to be placed at the Art and Anthropology Building of Eastern New Mexico University located in Portales.

I am excited and very honored for this painting to be selected. It measures 42″h x 65″w and was part of the Seshat work. It is made of plastic foliage, suction cups, paper, piano parts, twigs, metal mesh, beads, metal objects, eraser, acrylic paint, reactive paint, sand, string, glue, on canvas.

Artist Talk
February 25th 1:00PM
Ironton Gallery

This conversation will take place on the last day of the Blood Roses: a cycle of souls exhibition.
Please join me as I share my art-making process and practices, the subject matter that both inspired and haunted me, and my thoughts on what the creation of these works has stirred and awakened.

Blood Roses: a cycle of souls
Through February 25, 2012
Ironton Gallery

Brenda Stumpf will present seven new mixed media paintings along with some pen and ink drawings, in an exhibition titled Blood Roses: a cycle of souls. In this new series of work Stumpf delivers a deluge of red soaked encrusted objects and material, onto surfaces where the death and rebirth of the feminine are invoked.

The provocative subjects Stumpf exhumes are the victims of Jack the Ripper, women who were tortured and killed during the Inquisitions, and baby girls of female infanticide. Almost as a salve, each of the seven paintings is paired and caressed with a poem by Pablo Neruda.

“Yes, these are very physical and horrific themes, but for me they transcend into the spiritual, the symbolic, and the archetypal. You come to see that the Destroyer can be activated within you, annihilating the beautiful, expansive, and tender parts of yourself – not with knives cutting skin, but in the psyche, slicing the feminine piece by piece.

For me there is a profound healing in the making of art, the simultaneous healing of one’s life, ancestral lineage, and collective pain body. It is a mystical and potent act – a shamanistic environ that transcends time and space and has the power of the cosmos. And because energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another, it is a wonder where the soul has been and where it will reincarnate to on its cyclic journey.” -Brenda Stumpf

To view the 7 paintings and 13 drawings click here
To watch in-process video click here