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SEE THE WORK OF MARJORIE PORTNOW
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Marjorie
Portnow
Educated at Western Reserve University, Pratt Institute, Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture, Marjorie received her masters
of fine art at Brooklyn College where she studied with Philip Pearlstein
and Gabriel Laderman.
She
paints on location and is able to capture a unique sense of time
and place.
John
Arthur, in his book Spirit of Place: Contemporary Landscape Painting
and the American Tradition (Little Brown 1989, pg.86) describes
Marjorie's method of painting with great accuracy: "She carefully
works out her composition by viewing through a string grid, an old
device used by Dürer and Van Gogh, and blocks the image onto
the canvas with loose, colored washes of oil: She then slowly develops
and tightens the composition, bringing it to the clear airy conclusion
that typifies her work."
Speaking
of her own sense of place Marjorie has stated: "Place for me
means an area I have lived in and been moved by enough to paint
it many times over. Enough so that I close my eyes I have its image,
its particular sense of space and light, very present in my mind,
both visually and physically...I tend to pick a few places and go
back to those places over and over, day after day, to walk and to
paint (like Cezzanne) building up many layers of associations...I
feel these places are as necessary to me as food."
Elected
to membership in the National Academy of Design in New York City,
she also teaches there and at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts.
She has been visiting professor at many colleges and universities
in America. For may years she showed with the Fishbach Gallery and
recently had a one person show at Hollins University in Roanoke,
Virginia. Her work appears in almost all the major museum exhibitions
of American landscape painting including: The Landscape in Twentieth-Century
American Art ( Selections From The Metropolitan Museum of Art);
Landscape Painting (1960-1990) (The Italian Tradition in American
Art), and books in which her work appears include John Arthur's
The American Landscape Tradition Since 1950 and Alan Gussow's The
Artist as Native (Reinventing Regionalism). She has received fellowships
to Yaddo and the Mac Dowell Colony and innumerable awards including
The Hassan Purchase Prize from the American Institute Academy of
Arts and Letters: National Endowment of the Arts, Ingram Merrill
Grant, Tiffany Grant. Her many collections include The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, NYC; The Sheldon Art Museum, The National Academy
of Design, The Graham Gund Collection, The Jacob Kaplan Collection
Citibank Corporation of North America, and The AT&T Collection |
