SummEr/FAll 2011 - Nazareth College

COVER|story
m a u r e e n
Brilla-
Fitzpatrick
Maureen Brilla-Fitzpatrick
teaching a drawing class for
Nazareth students.
‘‘D
id you ever mess around with rocks?”
Maureen Brilla-Fitzpatrick poses the question to
the nine students watching her draw a can of Red
Bull, the energy drink, from a still life—an incongruous
collection that includes crayons, cupcake
wrappers, and a Curious George jack-in-the-box.
“If you move them around enough, they all fit
together somehow,” she continues. “But what’s fun
about a still life is you don’t have to set it up in a certain
way that looks pretty. The more you make adjustments,
the less you’re going to find out about the truth.
And the truth is that everything belongs together.
Everything plays off each other.”
Later, when the students are working on their own
drawings, she expands on the way her own work
evolves, taking them back, as she often does, to her
past. She remembers being four or five when she
became entranced by a book in the shape of a horse’s
head. She drew the head over and over again, then
began making up stories to fill in the picture. Where
did the horse live? What did the farm look like? Did a
girl ride him?
“That’s exactly how I paint now,” she explains.
“I don’t have a specific intention when I start the
work. The meaning of the piece develops as the work
develops.”
Brilla-Fitzpatrick, whose paintings have been in galleries
and exhibitions in four states and six countries, is
represented by Rochester’s Oxford Gallery, where she
is having a show of oil paintings, watercolors, pastels,
and figure drawings in October. It will be the first time
she has shown work in watercolors or pastels.
38 CONNECTIONS | Summer/Fall 2011 www.naz.edu