ABOUT MY WORK:
Mounted stabilized organic material, leaves, and wooden forms mingle with photos and painted strips serving as surrogate brushwork. Reading as movement back and forth, the superimposed textures and narratives appear as foreground, middle ground, and background, merging into abstract landscape. My work is three-dimensional painting: the un-collage. Always aiming for the beautiful picture. Often irony (an edge of humor) underlies the theme, as in The Birth of Venus: an elegant female scarecrow in Grecian drapery stands in a large garden on an actual sea shell (found on Cape Cod). A variant: she stands alone, no shell. Same garden, different colors. Goody Two-Shoes in the Bronx: Mother Teresa, wrapped in an American flag and holy medals, visits an urban backyard. Color is my primary concern, without use of a primary palette. Soft tones dominate in the service of muted poetry.
Sizes vary:16 x 20 inches – 35 x 40 inches
STUDIED:
With Mark Rothko for six years (when he was still Mark Rothkowiz)
At Cornell University, College of Architecture (BFA)
With Josef Albers in the Masters program at Yale
With Buckminster Fuller, collaborative projects at Cornell and Yale
Curator's Note: I've admired Abby's work for decades. The back-lit flat screen hardly does justice to her collages. They are quasi-assemblages, richly textured creations that invite themselves into the space we stand in while viewing them. Dorothy Parker said, "A reproduction is exactly like the original except in every respect ." So true in the case of Abby's ouevre, but rewards abound nevertheless! LS
Mounted stabilized organic material, leaves, and wooden forms mingle with photos and painted strips serving as surrogate brushwork. Reading as movement back and forth, the superimposed textures and narratives appear as foreground, middle ground, and background, merging into abstract landscape. My work is three-dimensional painting: the un-collage. Always aiming for the beautiful picture. Often irony (an edge of humor) underlies the theme, as in The Birth of Venus: an elegant female scarecrow in Grecian drapery stands in a large garden on an actual sea shell (found on Cape Cod). A variant: she stands alone, no shell. Same garden, different colors. Goody Two-Shoes in the Bronx: Mother Teresa, wrapped in an American flag and holy medals, visits an urban backyard. Color is my primary concern, without use of a primary palette. Soft tones dominate in the service of muted poetry.
Sizes vary:16 x 20 inches – 35 x 40 inches
STUDIED:
With Mark Rothko for six years (when he was still Mark Rothkowiz)
At Cornell University, College of Architecture (BFA)
With Josef Albers in the Masters program at Yale
With Buckminster Fuller, collaborative projects at Cornell and Yale
Curator's Note: I've admired Abby's work for decades. The back-lit flat screen hardly does justice to her collages. They are quasi-assemblages, richly textured creations that invite themselves into the space we stand in while viewing them. Dorothy Parker said, "A reproduction is exactly like the original except in every respect ." So true in the case of Abby's ouevre, but rewards abound nevertheless! LS
