After a peripatetic childhood and nearly three decades in the corporate world, Barbara Brenner found her true passion in art-making and settled into producing lush, close-up photographs of flowers and plants, and evocative, abstract compositions. She imbues her work with life experiences, expressing both the unsettled energy of her family’s constant relocation and the calm she sought within this chaos in the shapes, biomorphic forms, and hazy layers of soft color and wax that fill her mid- to large-scale panels. Among the most difficult mediums with which to work, encaustic, for Brenner, is the ideal challenge. “Exploring different mediums, I was drawn to encaustics,” she explains. “I was intrigued with the way wax moves and feels; the way the light can dance or sink on its surface, and the amazing diversity of hot wax.”
