Mia Brownell was born in Chicago, Illinois to a sculptor and biophysicist. She has had solo exhibitions in major American cities including New York, Boston and Washington, DC. Mia’s paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections.
Brownell has been influenced by early-modern still lifes, in particular the fruit and flower pieces of seventeenth-century Dutch masters. Her traditional technique — employed refreshingly — allows her to meticulously render her apples, grapes, apricots just as her predecessors did. The great difference is that in Baroque still lifes gravity rules: glasses have tumbled, skulls have rolled to their sides, pieces of bread lay scattered, musical instruments balance on edges of table-tops, and all the while the ubiquitous lemon peel spirals downward endlessly. Brownell does not grant her objects such grounding. Her fruits hang in mid-air as if weightless. Breathing a kind of lightness, her paintings do not so much build on the genre of still life as on its distant relative, the festoon, that antique ornament made for suspension.
