For our last RPW of the year (we’ll pick it up again in January 2025!) we are delighted to feature the visual art of Brenna Lopes. Brenna Cameron Lopes is a Massachusetts-based artist whose work centers on the naturalistic and fantastic. She is inspired by the way that mythology, folklore, and fairy tales forge a connection between the self and the natural world, and her art often settles at the meeting point of empirical observation and imaginative contemplation. She is forever chasing a sense of softness in her work, and trying to weave the tangled threads of her interest in history, literature, mythology, esotericism, and natural sciences into facets of her personal artistic tapestry.
Having studied English Literature at the graduate level, her work is informed by the poetry and writing which has colored her academic interests — specifically that which focuses on natural minutiae and mythical interpretation.
She works primarily in oil paint and pencil. Her stream-of-consciousness-style sketchbook pages form the foundation of her creative practice, and are the roots from which her oil paintings grow.
Brenna submitted both sketches and oil paintings (some of which you might find on her Instagram) so I have been able to pick some out to feature here. I almost never get to write about visual art, so this is a lot of fun for me!
Brenna was kind enough to tell us more about how her MLitt in Romantic Worlds (University of Glasgow) has helped shape her interest in intersections between literature and art:
I wrote my masters dissertation on Charlotte Smith’s botanical poetry, specifically on how her unique approach to botanizing, poetry, and natural history arose from her engagement with the work of contemporary male writers Erasmus Darwin and Gilbert White, yet developed into a unique style that merges timely discussions of natural history with her own distinct poetic voice. After the masters, I found that my work became informed by the elements of Romantic Literature which focus on natural minutiae and mythical interpretation, with an emphasis on emotion and imagination. I enjoy depicting people, particularly women, interacting with their environments, both physical and emotional. I am particularly attached to ideas of entanglement and interconnection, thus the environments in my work are often tangled up in various disciplinary interests, archetypal imagery, memories, and dreams. Nature as a symbol of hope, constancy, and comfort is a theme I absorbed from Smith’s work, and something that persists throughout mine. While my literary interests are wide ranging, Romanticism is ever at the core, and I feel that echoes of it are evident in my artistic work, whether directly or tangentially.
Sketches
This piece from Lopes’s sketchbook features a quote by Dorothy Wordsworth:
“It was a sweet morning – Everything green and overflowing with life, and the streams making a perpetual song with the thrushes and all the little birds”
This piece tries to capture, I think, something of the feeling of the wide net that Dorothy Wordsworth’s observations about nature tends to cast in her prose writings. The “perpetual song” seems to draw into it flowers and leaves, the lightness of hummingbirds’ wings (“chasing a sense of softness”), but also the parts of architecture that we can see, and what is not there–a bit of darkness cupping the statue in the top left corner, or settling around the plants in the lower right: as if things emerging and disappearing into the pressure behind the pencil were a force surrounding the world. Even the pencil shavings themselves seem to be arranged in contrast to the rest of the scene, making a three-dimensional representation that moves into and out of the paper as well as across it. The pencil also completes (if I may be so bold) the triangulation of the hummingbirds, as if it were a third bird; and this draws the eye to a blank spot near the top of the page, and to the sense that the unfinishedness of these objects is part of what makes them whole.
This sketch invites us to think about some comparisons: between a forest lane, on the one hand, and the gothic architecture of a place of worship; between a drooping hand–I see a hand that is clinging to life, but you are welcome to see it in a different light–and a branch of leaves that works its way up the page as if navigating interior space; and between two swans, curled in a protective pose, and a person looking “off screen” whose features fade away into ghostliness. Perhaps the “astonishment” is that life contains or might contain all of these things together, moving instinct, intellect, nature and design into the same contemplative purview.
Oil Paintings
Flora and the Country Green (2023)
Inspired by a line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”:
"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!"
Portrait of a Dryad (2023)
Looking back on Flora and the Country Green, I think about the way that poetical lines can be autonomous jumping-off points for new creative responses; especially, I think, where they make or suggest a mythological dimension. Mythological thinking means, on one level, that we can derive or extrapolate something new from a piece of our experience, or grow a fragment of thought into a whole idea. We can see it in the cover of Matthew Sangster’s book An Introduction to Fantasy (Cambridge UP, 2023), which uses the line of a river to draw the eye forward into a vista featuring a dragon and a magical castle (and which Lopes illustrated!). Lopes’s work is proof of this way of thinking:
the lightness centered in the dryad's face, hath found its mirror in the leaves of plants, and solemn thought, though in a lonely place might make a tune to which the Heart can dance.
Sweet Remembrancers (2024)
A series of oil paintings inspired by the Huntington Botanical Gardens in California. The title is an allusion to the final lines in Charlotte Smith’s “The Horologue of the Fields”:
"Thus in each flower and simple bell, That in our path untrodden lie, Are sweet remembrancers who tell How fast the winged moments fly."
So long . . . until we meet again!
That’s it for this first series of Romantic Poets in the Wild! You can go back and check out the other featured artists by clicking on the blog’s #romanticpoetsinthewild hashtag–it should bring you to a page where you can peruse the entire series. It sure has been fun meeting the people who responded to the original call for contributors, and working with them to share their work with the world! We already have a few names lined up for next year, including Clay Johnson, John Gallas, Sophia Haywood, and Ezra Shaw. But we need more! So without further ado . . .
Romantic Poets in the Wild: Call for Contributors (2025)
Are you a writer, musician, or visual artist who has been inspired by Romanticism/the Romantics and would like to have your work featured on the BARS blog? Please get in touch with our series editor and Comms Fellow Adam Neikirk by emailing him (adamneikirk@gmail.com) or reaching out on social media. Adam doesn’t use X/Twitter anymore, but is available via BlueSky, Instagram, or Facebook! We love to hear from all creative people, no matter where you are at in terms of your career; and we especially love to hear from academics and scholars of Romanticism who have a creative bone! So please reach out!
Until next time!
Adam Neikirk
