Brenda Proudfoot will display her drawings at the Brandon-Mitchell Gallery at the Spiritual Awareness Center from March 7 through the month of April. There will be an artist’s reception during the First Friday Art Walk on Friday, March 7, from 5:30-8pm.
The drawings, titled “Broken Open,” are the images she created after two traumatic events in her life. Before 2009, she had not done any drawing beyond the art classes in public school education. At the urging of a good friend, she tentatively took up the pencil and sketchpad as a way to work with the news from her brother that he intended to die by suicide. One year after he died, she discovered a lump on her breast. Several months later, she had a full mastectomy.
“Once I began drawing, the images poured out of my inner landscape in an almost unstoppable flow,” she explained. “The drawings represent the power of art as a pathway to understanding the course of my life, and to wrest beauty and meaning from the deep suffering I experienced—the almost overwhelming grief, shock and loss to body and soul.”
Proudfoot is a yoga teacher and the owner of Valley Yoga. Her drawings are accompanied by quotes from the Yoga Sutra, a revered text of yoga philosophy.
“As a viewer, the drawings engage you first. Then you read the text. A walk among the drawings becomes a yoga practice, an inward-directed meditation.”
Proudfoot got her start teaching yoga in Visalia at the Spiritual Awareness Center.
The center is located at 117 S. Locust St. in Visalia, one block south of Main Street. The Brandon-Mitchell Gallery is open during First Friday Art Walks each month and by appointment. Call 625-2441 to arrange to see the show.