Mark Brennan

 Mark Brennan lives in Brooklyn, New York and Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass. Stylistically he owes a debt to traditional East Asian painting in his elongated watercolors. His small pictures encased in boxes have affinities with an array of distinctly American artists; one can draw references to William Trost Richards, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, to William Harnett and John Peto, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Cornell and Vija Celmins. Like the early Hudson River School and many 20th Century abstract artists, he unapologetically experiments with altruistic and transcendent functions for art, both in his work and in his curatorial enterprises.

In the 1980s he participated in the florid East Village art scene while working for Andy Warhol in the Interview circulation department. Shortly before Warhol’s death, he suddenly abandoned both relationships to travel North America, living in the back of a station wagon. Upon his return to New York, he began teaching public school in District 9 (the poorest congressional district in the country) in the Bronx. A weekend activity, painting, gradually expanded into an avocation.