Luce Wren Brandt is an oil painter and writer from Salem and Ipswich Massachusetts. She received her B.A from Mount Holyoke College in Environmental Science and Studio Art. Luce graduated magna cum laude, a recipient of the Global Competence award and a four year Leadership Scholarship. In Fall of 2023 she participated in the Syracuse University studio art program in Florence. Pouring herself into painting, drawing, screen printing, and writing, Luce decided to pivot her future, toward a practice in art and teaching. Luce spent two years working and painting as she prepared for graduate school. In that time she was part of several shows in Ipswich and one at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She exhibited her first solo show Light as Memory in 2023, followed by Traces in 2024. She is now an MFA Painting and Drawing candidate at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, expected to graduate in spring 2026. To support her studies, Luce was granted a Visionary Scholars Award from SAIC, as well as the Joseph Skinner Fellowship from Mount Holyoke College.
I am a painter and a writer, a storyteller whose work inhabits memory, landscapes of familiarity, and the resonance of home. I am curious how people and places simultaneously imprint each other, how the love, loss, and surprise of generations sculpt the earth. Guided by my studies of environmental science, I follow land use, climate change, and the transitional spaces where habitats and ecosystems overlap, creating areas of heightened biodiversity. One such poetry lies along the edges of city, where our built world dissolves into natural elements. In this inter-seeding of humans and place, I sense the age of a land inscribed by time, weather, and hands. My work asks the name of things growing and alive. I situate myself amongst life as a practice of joy. I explore the edge of colors, how they dull or fizz in conversation. My paintings seek the quality of light that makes a place known. Shadows that are a mark of specific time, a trace of circumstance and materiality. My work offers a place to rest and ruminate, to witness the everyday beauty we inhabit.