Exhibits at Historic Northampton

Legacies: Paintings by
Matt Brackett and Prilla Smith Brackett

April 8 - May 6, 2011

Artist's Reception: April 8, 2011 5 - 8 pm

Painters Prilla Smith Brackett and Matt Brackett, mother and son, share a unique bond to Northampton through their ancestsor and fellow painter, Charles C. Burleigh, Jr. (1848-1882). The show Legacies: Paintings by Matt Brackett and Prilla Smith Brackett presents the work of these two contemporary painters in conjunction with Burleigh's work in an adjacent gallery.

Prilla and Matt recently traveled together to visit Historic Northampton's collection of memorabilia and artwork by Burleigh, Prilla's great grandfather. Both were thrilled by his paintings, sketchbooks and studio props, and especially by the smell of the paintbox he used over 120 years ago. Burleigh died an untimely death in 1882 at the age of 34, but his work survives thanks to the dedication of his wife Ida Aldrich Burleigh and later their daughter Gertrude Burleigh Coffin, Prilla's grandmother. Charles' legacy as a young painter was thus preserved to inspire not only his descendants but also generations of scholars and museum visitors.

Reflecting on their visit, Prilla and Matt realized that other legacies exist in their work beyond the mere fact that they are descendant painters. Burleigh painted landscapes, which have long been the focus of Prilla's work and which now play a large role in Matt's paintings. But a deeply-rooted legacy of a special, family place also informs both Matt and Prilla's work. Both artists have fond memories of spending portions of their childhoods in a family home on Powder Point in Duxbury, MA, where Ida lived the last decades of her life in company with Gertrude. Prilla was 12 when Ida died at 99 years of age, and she has vivid memories both of her great grandmother and of the intergenerational belongings that filled the house, including many of Burleigh's paintings and drawings.

When the family was forced at last to sell Ida and Gertrude's home, both Prilla and Matt created and exhibited together paintings that featured the house, its inhabitants, its furnishings and surroundings on Duxbury Bay. By addressing their loss in this way, they extended the Burleigh legacy one more generation. Prilla and Matt's current work continues to reflect a deep connection to that special place and its embodiment of a rich family tradition.

Prilla's drawings, monoprints and paintings draw on forest imagery from a previous body of work and incorporate semi-transparent vintage furniture from the house that had been such a major part of the family's life.  Prilla notes that in our cultural history forests have long been scary places on civilization's edge, as well as places of refuge and hidden secrets, of solace and spirituality, of make-believe.  By juxtaposing the memory-charged domestic with the awe-inspiring, and sometimes violent natural, she combines her two compelling interests to create a fascinating narrative uncertainty.

Matt's paintings share this sense of mystery and longing though with a slightly more menacing cast.  Long a painter of people, Matt found that as a result of his re-immersion in children's stories shared with his young daughter, he began to feel influenced by the metaphorical depictions of animals.  He noticed the animals emerging in his long-practiced, stream-of-consciousness drawing process that provides the content of many of his paintings.  These animal images, like all his previous paintings, do not represent truth or reality but hold no less meaning as a result.  The creatures of this body of work predominantly inhabit the coastal landscapes surrounding the old family house, where the roles they might play in myths, folk tales or nursery rhymes are transformed in a decidedly grown-up domain.

Together, the artwork of Prilla and Matt tell a remarkable story in context with that of Charles C. Burleigh Jr.  In their paintings we see spaces created across generations where the imagination can wander, memory can surface, and the ties between mother, son and ancestor can bind.

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