Brenda Brosi Benson
Brenda Brosi Benson was born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri. She received her degree in Art from Truman State University and has studied watercolor in workshops with such people as Duane Light, Marilynn Bradley and Paul Jackson. She taught art for 26 years in the public schools while she and her husband, Danny, raised their four children.
"Since I've retired from teaching art I am pursuing my first love, painting! My media of choice is watercolor, but I also enjoy drawing and ceramics. I have a secret desire to be a sculptor and lately have incorporated the third dimension into my watercolors.
Some of the pieces on display here have grown out of an inspiration I had after I saw Dale Chihuly's glass in the garden exhibit in the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis in 2006. The whimsical forms, the colors, juxtaposed against architectural shapes really struck a chord with me. I couldn't wait to get home and start inventing paintings of color, line and shape that captured the movement, transparency and reflective quality of Chihuly's glass. This quickly evolved into my own inventions. Presently, my direction is to work in a grid, in a shadow box-like format. Many of these pieces are experiments to see where this 3-d watercolor can take me, I'm just having so much fun with them, and I don't know where these experiments will go. I just know that these pieces express my basic joy of living, the color and whimsy inspired by Chihuly, and a sense of explorations and discovery!"