At once sacred and intimate, Brenda’s work captures the natural world in the ancient ways of mystery and magic. Her portraits (and self-portraits) rely on known objects and symbols to create a new realm, a subtle interpretation.

True to her Chumash heritage, she retrieves the world for us: the world we walked past at street level, the world we drove right by on our way somewhere in our human-scale automobiles, the insurmountable evidence we ignored. As a visual artist, she fulfills several roles at once: shaman, village elder, Tomol Paddler, poet and seer, to remind us what we have forgotten.

—Jon Obermeyer