Duck in the Cup by Tammy Brackens

Tammy Brackens has worked at the ECF Art Centers since 1985. Brackens' has developed a highly methodical and consistent process for creating her surrealist style watercolor paintings. Each composition begins as a carefully conceived collage comprised of clippings from fashion magazines and periodicals, the collage is then rendered as a small preliminary watercolor painting. After after having resolved all compositional and aesthetic elements, Brackens produces the final result: a large-scale watercolor painting. 

Stylistically, her work follows a purely surrealist lineage influenced by her own subconscious fixations: children, animals, femininity, motherhood, notions of self and other - all of which represent some of her most prevalent and longstanding fascinations. The breadth of Brackens’ work reveals not only the remarkably disciplined practice of a skilled and methodical craftswoman, but a deeply personal struggle of a woman with a developmental disability struggling to negotiate shifting degrees of self autonomy, desire, longing, and self discovery.