Flying into the unknown
Prilla Smith Brackett on the path to making "Flight #9," on view in "The Long View #2" at Suffolk University Gallery
Prilla Smith Brackett’s most recent works use the desiccated leaves and ancient rootlets of a clivia plant as launchpads for flights into the unknown.
It’s a shift. Most of her career, Prilla has focused on depicting what she sees. Her conceptual landscapes, such as the Fragments series of the 1990s into the 2000s, explore humanity’s separation from nature. Some celebrate our kinship with it. But recent pieces made during her husband’s long decline due to dementia and after his death in 2023 are less about seeing and more about being.
“The process of accepting lack of permanence, inability to control things, except ones own actions, all came gradually For one thing, my husband’s nine-year dementia journey was a long, very difficult, and important learning process for me, only gradually realizing I couldn’t change things, gradually learning to go with the flow, enter into his world,” she wrote in an email. There was also Covid to contend with. To help, Prilla developed a meditation practice.
In the studio these days, she doesn’t start with much of a concept, beyond her source material and pragmatic considerations, like “what about more white space?” She follows the flow. In short, her life experience has moved her from standing outside and observing nature to accepting that she herself is part of nature, her process an expression of its transmutations.
Along with Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz and Barbara Grad, Prilla is featured in The Long View #2: Women Artists in the Studio, the second in a trio of shows at Suffolk University Art Gallery spotlighting Boston women artists over 65 (more on that show here). The exhibition has gravitas because all three painters are deep practitioners of their craft and they share a passionate concern about our earthly habitat. But many of Prilla’s paintings and prints (made in collaboration with Carolyn Muskat of Muskat Studios) very nearly frolic. Especially those in her most recent Flight series, which she writes about here. Lines prance and twist; colors splash and dissolve into warm auras. These works don’t begin or end with being “about” something. They exist for the energy, the joy of making. Not planning, not observing, not controlling. Just being in the thick of creation.
Prilla writes:
