Exhibited: A - G: Isabel Bigelow

Many of her works on paper are reductive landscapes. By zeroing in on portions of a view (the branches of a tree, a field, a lawn) and paring down colors to a minimum, I intend to bring more attention to the detail and difference that remains in the picture. I want the viewer to encounter the works as a sensed experience of a landscape, rather than as a picture of a landscape. The shapes are flat like shadows of the actual forms, and the colors frequently bear little resemblance to the color of an observed situation.

Without trying to reproduce the particular woods or field, I try to evoke a sensation of passing by such a place in a blur, of looking up into backlit vines or leaves, or of conjuring up an idealized branch of a willow tree held in the mindís eye.

Isabel Bigelow received a MFA from Maryland Institute of Art and a BA from Harvard University. Her past awards/residencies are: Yaddo, Residency; MacDowell Colony; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Bronx Museum of the Arts, etc. and her works are in public collections: New York Public Library, Sundance Channel in New York, NY; Fidelity Investments, Boston, MA; The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; The Museum of Western Virginia, Roanoke, VA; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.