Mentorship Style: I am nurturing, supportive, and actively seek ways to share ideas and resources from my own experience and research. I look to adapt the flow of the program towards the dynamic of my particular group of mentees. I have found that the most productive sessions are when everyone contributes in an organic, constructive and open manner – and I seek to facilitate that rhythm through conversation, questions, feedback, and genuine encouragement.

Bio: Philadelphia based artist Arden Bendler Browning makes large abstract paintings, small works on paper and panel, and interactive virtual reality environments. Each format of work informs the next, and contemplates the perception of landscape, experience of time, and the contemporary desire to present many perspectives simultaneously. Intense, vibrant color, sweeping gestures, and areas of finer detail always show evidence of the artist’s hand – even in the digital VR spaces. Her work is a direct response to her environments – whether it is her urban home base, hikes in nature, or family travels.

Arden Bendler Browning performs personalized pictorial exercises that rediscover the energy produced through chromatic relations and references. Bendler Browning’s practice weaves together loose, gestural, and, at times, translucent ribbons of color with more opaque and crisply delineated prismatic vectors and organically outlined forms. Whether rendered in paint or painted virtually into digital space, she radically expands the psychedelic parameters of her canvases into infinite imaginary worlds. (excerpt from essay by art historian and curator Jennie Hirsh, for “Fields and Formations” catalogue, 2021)