DENISE STEWART-SANABRIA

Denise Stewart-Sanabria was born in Massachusetts and received her BFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She has lived in Knoxville, TN, since 1986. She paints hyper-realist epicurean dramas of everything from produce to subversive jelly donuts, as well as observations on human behavior and history. Though she doesn’t think of herself as a “woman artist”, she hints at themes of womanhood and strength through the symbols and color palette choices.

Traditionally-styled still lifes are often dark and muted, but Stewart-Sanabria brings her subjects to life in vibrant shades of technicolor. She elevates the color pink from something regarded as trivial to a rich and essential hue for her luscious paintings.

Stewart-Sanabria is also known for her life size charcoal portrait drawings on plywood, which are cut out, mounted on wood bases, and staged in conceptual installations. Most of Stewart-Sanabria’s reference material comes from observing people at art receptions. People give off subtle clues as to the culture and social groupings they inhabit. When a group of people inhabit a space, they observe certain territorial rules that govern where they are and what direction they are moving in relation to where others are located. They form predictable geometric patterns that are replicated in everything from the herding and flocking behaviors of other species, to wild seed and plant scatterings, to even star and constellation patterns.

She is a recipient of the 2019 Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant for her work on wood. Her work is included in collections such as The Tennessee State Museum, The Evansville Museum of Art, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Huntsville Museum of Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Knoxville Botanical Gardens, TriStar Energy, the Aslan Foundation, and Meta.