Doug Brega is a realist in a revelatory sense of the word. He paints not only what appears to the eye but also sees with an intensity that reveals a reality beneath the common one. Though his masterful technique and verisimilitude is often commented on, for Brega the goal is more than an impressive accretion of detail: it is a glimpse of the true structure and character of his subject, whether it is a person or a building.


This vision that sees beyond the surface of his subjects even while meticulously depicting them is what gives these works their iconic power. They have a timeless quality which belies their execution in that most ephemeral of media, watercolor. Doug Brega is able to render the subtleties of texture and color of vegetation and rock and flesh with a sensitive and expressive brush, when a single miscue means starting all over again.


Brega was born on Christmas day, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts and grew up in the neighboring town of East Longmeadow. His principal art studies took place at the Paier School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut under renowned trompe l'oeil artist Ken Davies, who became his most important teacher and mentor. Davies impressed upon him the importance of drawing as a foundation for his work, at a time when this emphasis on realist technique was out of fashion. His other major influences are the American realists Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and especially Andrew Wyeth.


Doug Brega has achieved international recognition for his realistic, evocative portraits and renderings of New England houses, sailboats and weather beaten barns. His first major solo show in New York sold out; it was the first of many successful exhibitions that were to follow in Nantucket, Cape Cod, Washington D.C., and Jackson, Mississippi. Doug and his brother David Brega were honored with a joint retrospective exhibition, “Oil and Water,” that traveled to the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, MA and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Fine Art, Missouri. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City, Missouri, the Albrecht-Kemper Museum and in the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts.  Mr. Brega’s second one-man exhibition is scheduled for November 2007 at Hammer Galleries.