Biography

Brenda Schwend is a Florida artist based in Nassau County.

She was a recipient of the Eleanor Allen Best in Show in 2019 at the FSCJ Art and Design Awards. Her work was published in the inaugural issue of Rad X magazine in 2020. She exhibited her work in two independent showings, Parallel Lives and Attachments, at Bold Bean Beaches and Stockton street locations in 2021 and 2022. She was also selected to participate in the Jacksonville Bicentennial Art Exhibition in 2022.

For 2023, she participated in The Art of Well-Being Exhibition at The Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Florida. Her painting, Essence of Being, was awarded second place.

Her current series is exploring glass and its role and refractions in the lives of women.

Artist Statement

I paint because I feel I am best able to express my ideas and thoughts through that medium.  From the first time my brush touched a canvas, I loved everything about it: the smell of the paint, the way it glides over a canvas, the way color behaves when it’s mixed together.  I found it to be an opening of a door, another way to communicate that had previously not been open to me.  Painting as an art form is many things.  To me, it is at its best when communicating ideas, feelings or opinions of the artist and that is exciting to me.   This current series is an examination of transparency and vulnerability of the human condition.   Despite attempts to hide fragility under excess consumerism or curated images presented to the world via social media, underneath it all, we are fragile and prone to breakage.