Tag Archives: Abstract Art

Abstract Art Profiles: “City Landscape – 1955” By Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955, oil on linen, 203.2 × 203.2 cm (Art Institute of Chicago 1958.193, ©The Estate of Joan Mitchell), a Seeing America video

Speakers: Sarah Alvarez, Director of School Programs, Art Institute of Chicago, Beth Harris, and Steven Zucker

 

Profiles: 66-Year Old American Painter Peggy Cyphers – “Luminosity”

Peggy Cyphers - Luminescent Waterfall 2018 mixed media on canvasPeggy Cyphers has a persistent vision of nature that she translates into richly colored and textured quasi-abstract paintings. She pours and lightly brushes countless layers of paint and sand onto the canvas until she achieves luminous and sumptuous surface. Approaching each canvas as a kind of garden where organic and geometric elements intermingle with intense light, she nurtures elaborate hybrid forms. David Ebony, ArtNet Magazine

Peggy Cyphers (born 1954) is an American painter, printmaker, professor and art writer, who has shown her work in the U.S. and internationally since 1984. Since Cyphers’ move to New York City over 30 years ago, her inventive and combinatory approaches to the materials of paint, silkscreen and sand have developed into canvases that explore the “Politics of Progress” as it impacts culture and the natural world.

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Artist Profiles: 69-Year Old American Painter Sigrid Burton (Video)

“I draw literally and figuratively from the natural world. My drawing and mark making refer to and derive from botanical and biological anatomies, including marine life, as well as, the structures of both macro and micro cosmologies and writing systems, such as logograms.” 

Sigrid Burton is an American painter, long based in New York City, whose semi-abstract work is known for its use of expressive, atmospheric color fields and enigmatic allusions to natural and cultural realms. Burton has had solo exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Osaka, including at Artists Space and the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, and been included in shows at A.I.R. Gallery, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation, and Palm Springs Desert Museum, and has been reviewed in Arts Magazine, Arts & Antiques, Jung Journal, Chicago Tribune and LA Weekly.

Writers most frequently observe that Burton’s atmospheric works recall artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard and Mark Rothko, as well as the light of her native California. Art & Antiques described her approach as “chromatic expressionism” in which color is “her undisputed protagonist”.  Peter Frank observed, “The dialectic between color and form has always inflected, even impelled” Burton’s painting, with color the more omnipresent element, and form the more persistent. Art historian William C. Agee wrote, “The domains she explores […] meet, intersect, fuse, and then disappear, like apparitions, in liquid pools of mist and color. Her pictorial odyssey refers simultaneously to both a higher order, a timeless cosmic vastness, as well as to a private, interior world, abounding in personal histories and memories.” Burton has lived and worked in Pasadena, California since 2013.

From Wikipedia

Profiles: 82-Year Old American Abstract Painter Larry Poons

From a Wall Street Journal online profile (March 3, 2020):

I had a handful of school friends, including Francis Ford Coppola, who was in the grade behind me. He was known then as Frank. He directed school plays, such as “Finian’s Rainbow.” That’s where I fell in love with the girl. She was a dancer in the cast.

Painting, music and poetry all spoke to me, especially music. I applied to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Larry Poons, 82, is an abstract painter best known for his “dot” and “throw” paintings. “Larry Poons” (Abbeville), a book-length monograph of his work from the 1950s to the present, will be published in September. He spoke with Marc Myers.

The first time I painted on canvas board, I was lovesick. I had a crush on a girl in high school and had just finished reading Irving Stone’s Van Gogh biographical novel, “Lust for Life.”

I took my easel to a nearby park and painted trees. As I worked the paint with a small brush, it helped get my feelings out.

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Profiles: 55-Year Old Canadian Artist Mark Laguë – “Painter Of Light”

Painter of Light

Canadian Artist MARK LAGUËMark has developed an international reputation and has won numerous awards, both in his native Canada and in the United States. A dedicated painter, Mark Lague was born in Lachine Quebec in 1964 and he has had a fascination with drawing since childhood, a skill he practices constantly, even to this day.

Mark Laguë Artist website collage

Upon graduation from Montreal’s Concordia University in Design, Mark embarked on a 13-year career in the animation industry, working primarily as a background designer and art director. During this time, despite working full time, he began receiving international acclaim for his watercolour paintings through competitions, juried shows, and solo exhibitions.

In 2000, Mark switched to oil as his primary medium, and in 2002 made the jump to full time painter. As an artist he is a realist, who is open to virtually all subject matter. What keeps him excited about painting is his endless quest to simplify and get to the essence of whatever he paints. Mark has been featured in numerous national art magazines, and continues to receive international recognition for his distinctive style of painting.

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