“My paintings are often seen as trippy cosmic expressions, obsessive pattern paintings, or cartoon-like scientific diagrams gone awry. For my part, I want the work to be elegiac, evocative and occasionally funny, with some visual buzz and sensation.” B. Takenaga, Artist Statement 2005 "...Her paintings rely on the repetition of dots in saturated colors to form various patterns and create sweeping or spiraling movements. The center or horizon of these paintings often is lighter, creating a luminous effect. In the last several years, Takenaga's penchant for a neon-bright, even garish palette has changed following the death of her mother in 2002. The muted "twilight palette" of grays and blues reflects Takenaga's mourning. The artist has remarked that "the colors got icier and colder. I think these grey paintings have some sense of fading-- shiny, hazy, shifting." Due to her use of tessellated forms, Takenaga's work is noted for its challenging optical quality. A sense of infinity and boundlessness are associated with the dizzying patterns created in her paintings. Her series Night Paintings, for instance, are based on "recurring childhood dreams about the origins of the universe." Her upbringing in rural Nebraska is connected to this sense of "boundlessness." Art critic Nancy Princenthal suggests that "these paintings evoke the flat farmland of Takenaga's childhood home, in Nebraska [...] There is that sense of limitless, unmarked expanses in Takenaga's recent paintings, of matter-of-fact infinitude." The laborious, repetitive process involved to make her paintings suggests the passing of time in her work. Susan Cross writes: "Takenaga has likened her approach to art-making to both soap opera narratives in which essentially nothing happens over long stretches of time and to the myth of Odysseus's wife Penelope, who unraveled her weaving each night for three years to put off her unwanted suitors. In a similar fashion, Takenaga's process both marks... (Wikipedia) undefined

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