Mary Monk

"Lake Pontchartain" soft pastel on paper, en plein air landscape, Louisiana

2018

Inspired by scenes from iconic American landscapes, ranging from arid deserts to lush forests, Jacobsen delves into humanity’s connection to nature and the technology that often mediates that experience. Embedded in the works is the recognition of nature’s immense power in contrast to its quickening fragility. Increasingly, under threat from the continuing rollback of regulations and protections in favor of exploitation for commercial gain, the double-edged sword of technology and the legacy of Westward expansion continue into the present day. For Jacobsen, American parks act as a foil to European colonization and resource extraction. While the creation of National Parks may be one of America’s greatest innovations, in preserving these beautiful and once wild places, they are in practice reduced to roadside attractions. Jacobsen states, “By elevating these picturesque landscapes we also diminish our own place in them. No longer are we participants in the divine dance but instead menacing spectators observing from stadium...

Inspired by scenes from iconic American landscapes, ranging from arid deserts to lush forests, Jacobsen delves into humanity’s connection to nature and the technology that often mediates that experience. Embedded in the works is the recognition of nature’s immense power in contrast to its quickening fragility. Increasingly, under threat from the continuing rollback of regulations and protections in favor of exploitation for commercial gain, the double-edged sword of technology and the legacy of Westward expansion continue into the present day. For Jacobsen, American parks act as a foil to European colonization and resource extraction. While the creation of National Parks may be one of America’s greatest innovations, in preserving these beautiful and once wild places, they are in practice reduced to roadside attractions. Jacobsen states, “By elevating these picturesque landscapes we also diminish our own place in them. No longer are we participants in the divine dance but instead menacing spectators observing from stadium...

This work was part of "Body Politics", the August/September 2022 exhibition marked the debut of this work in the region (New Orleans), and the first time any of these works have been...

Pastel and Coloured Pencils on Hahnemühle paper 300g - Summer Garden, Pool, Drawing, Pastel Work Title : Jardin d'été (EN : Summer Garden) Artist : Gabriel Riesnert (French artist, B...

Work : Soft Pastel on archival and heavy paper for pastel drawing. The colors are fixed on the paper and the work has been treated with a UV-resistant varnish. Signed lower right. Un...

Signed "Nell Blaine" upper left in pencil. Signed, titled, dated verso on sheet. Signed, titled, dated verso on backing panel. The artist. Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Purchased by private collectors c.1994. By descent. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). Exhibited at Fischbach Gallery, NYC, in 1994 (Gallery label verso, and wall label affixed verso). Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC (the artist's estate representative), exhibited 2020 (label verso). From her November 15, 1996 NYT obituary: Nell Blaine, a widely respected New York landscape painter and watercolorist, died yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. She was 74 and had homes in Manhattan and Gloucester, Mass. Ms. Blaine, who had been hospitalized since July, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1959, when she contracted polio. Ms. Blaine was born in Richmond, Va., in 1922, and first studied at the Richmond School of Art, now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. She moved to New York in 1942 to study painting with Hans Hofmann and later studied etching and engraving at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter. During her first years in New York, her work, which had previously been tightly realist, turned abstract, inspired by Mondrian, Leger and Jean Helion. At one time she was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists. She was also a founding member of the Jane Street Gallery, one of Manhattan's earliest artists' cooperatives, and had her first solo show there in 1945. Just as Ms. Blaine was becoming known as a promising abstract painter, and gaining the admiration of such critics as Clement Greenberg, she started to shift back to representation. Inspired in part by a trip with Larry Rivers in 1950 to Paris, where she was especially impressed by the work of Vuillard and Bonnard, she immersed herself in the tradition of 19th-century European painting. From the mid-1950's, she cultivated an increasingly painterly and colorful style, usually working directly from nature, or still life, with particular emphasis on the forms and hues of flowers. Her work retained a sense of all-over structure and pulsating energy that she nonetheless credited to abstract art. ''It all goes back to Mondrian,'' she would say. In the 1950's, Ms. Blaine was prominent among a circle of New York artists and poets that included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Rivers, Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Robert De Niro Sr. and Rudy Burckhardt. She had her first solo show of representational work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953 and was represented by the Poindexter Gallery until it closed in 1978, and, in recent years, by the Fischbach Gallery. During the 1950's she supported herself as a commercial artist, designing brochures for art galleries. In 1955, she designed the original logo, column heads and layout for The Village Voice. In 1957, Ms. Blaine was featured in Life magazine as one of five leading young female artists in America. In 1959, after several months of traveling and painting in Greece, she contracted severe bulbar polio on the island of Mykonos. ''To Nell Blaine,'' an exhibition organized at Poindexter to raise money for her hospital bills, included the work of 79 artists, including Saul Steinberg, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Mr. Rivers, Ms. Freilicher and Robert Rauschenberg. After eight months in a New York hospital, including five months in an iron lung...