Prilla Brackett visited the Amazon jungle on a family trip to Colombia...she spent most of her
year as a Bunting Fellow in the studio, working from photographs to re-create the jungle in black ink
and gray pastels, white paint and charcoal. Her drawings trace the play of light falling through the
lavish vegetation of the rain forrest....Brackett's drawings show a moment of stillness in the dance of
a world that is constantly growing. The smooth white vines twist and curl around the trees like
lovers embracing. The thin trunks reach up to the light: their enormous roots hug the ground.
Sunlight filters down through the big leaves like light shining through the windows of a Gothic
cathedral.
Rebecca Nemser, The Boston Phoenix
Prilla Smith Brackett explores not the boundary between but the overlap of nature and
civilization, in lush, painterly, grisaille close-ups of ancient trees snapped apart, their roots reaching
under concrete. They're noble in their defeat these old trees. Enigmatic shadows and reflections add
the suspense of a Hitchcock film to these paintings.
Christine Temin, The Boston Globe
Brackett loves trees. You can see that in the way her lines caress roots and branches; in the
way even small details light her imagination. She forces us to look at the details, as well, in the way
she composes and breaks apart each work. “Silent Striving” groups small paintings into a grid,
interspersing details from old-growth forests with details of urban trees: the way a root burrows
beneath a sidewalk; the skeletal stretch of dead branches into lake water. The grid of paintings is
filled with intersections – those in its structure and those within the works of crossed branches and
cast shadows. The result is both a sense of network and a sense of fracture....They all tell the same,
never ending story – city tree and country tree, noble and gnarled in their persistence despite our
efforts to crowd them out.
Cate McQuiad, The Boston Globe
Ranging in subject from old growth forests in New England to panoramas of Tanzania, Prilla
Smith Brackett’s landscapes attest to her ongoing engagement with environmental issues....
Brackett’s most recent work are triptychs expressing a more peaceful co-existence of the
human and the natural. The side images were inspired by views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the
central images by scenes around Brackett’s home in Cambridge, Mass. The sense of decay and
forceful intrusion – so visible in the earlier Remnants series – is no longer apparent, as the very
simple architecture of the urban environment enhances the dignity and intricate beauty of trees.
At the outset of the nineteenth century, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich painted
masterful portraits of trees, seemingly imbuing them with a personality. Brackett’s trees have a
similar strength, her landscapes a comforting serenity. Although her theme is human intervention,
we get the sense that nature will withstand many indignities, offering us time to rethink the
repercussions of our actions.
Janis Tomlinson, National Academy of Sciences exhibition brochure
Brackett’s series revolves around one beloved summer house in Duxbury built in 1906, in the
woods and on the water....While the background swirling of trees and water are naturalistic in the
two larger paintings, with loose and gestural brushstrokes, they contrast to the rather cool,
architectural rendering of the house, and all its many window-pane rectangles....The series departs
from her usual work,... landscapes and deep wooded scenes with curvilinear trees which seem to
entwine and animate the forest; in contrast these are more contained, cooler, like a snapshot in
time from a sketchbook of memories to preserve but to no longer inhabit.
Ellen Howards, Arts Media
Prilla Smith Brackett, well respected for her paintings of landscape, chooses to explore the
interaction of parts of the house with the landscape, as seen from indoors looking out. We are invited
to observe trees, windows, chairs and beds that are still, silent and empty. She has made landscape
and architecture the referent for her memories and those of her family. In Prilla’s work, landscape is
captured and framed by the squares and angles of the house. These fragmented images of landscape
emphasize how memories become incomplete. She often applies layers of translucent color, almost
like scrims, to her paintings. These ghost-like areas become metaphors for memories that overlap
and weave into each other and are difficult to grasp completely...
The family home depicted in these paintings is soon to be sold, a victim of circumstances beyond
control....Brackett invite(s) us to reflect...in a 90-year history of family and place, of landscape and
activity, of memory and imagination, of love and loss.
Catherine Mayes, The Art Complex Museum exhibition brochure