Description

This painting by Marion Greenstone transports you to another place -- to Vermont, upstate New York, or an Italian hillside. In an essay by Bryony Roberts, found on the website dedicated to the life and work of Marion Greenstone, Roberts wrote that "from the late 1970s through the 1990s, Greenstone produced an astonishing number of large-scale abstract paintings. Inspired often by shells and landscapes, the radiant paintings have sweeping, layered forms. The influence of Georgia O'Keefe and Mark Rothko, two of her favorite artists, can be seen in her use of warm, vibrant colors and natural shapes. Greenstone applied very thin paint with brushy marks to create delicate but glowing surfaces."  Although this painting has no date, we imagine that this painting is from this especially productive and successful period of Greenstone's long and varied career.  

Details

• Marion Greenstone (American, 1925-2005)
• Untitled 
  
• Oil on canvas
  
• Signed in lower right hand corner
  
• 49 3/4" x 61 3/4" (overall) 47 3/4" x 60" (sight)
• Newly stretched framed in a wood and gold-finished frame

About the Artist

Excerpted from an essay by Bryony Roberts:

Marion Greenstone was born in 1925 and spent most of her life in New York City. After earning her B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1946, she studied for a Masters in Teaching at the Teachers College of Columbia University. Although she graduated in 1947 with teaching credentials, she felt a need to explore her artistic impulses and went back to school for an art degree. She first studied with Norman Lewis at the Art Students League, and picked up his angular style along with his elegant fusion of abstraction and figuration. She moved to the Cooper Union Art School from 1951 to 1954 and then won a Fulbright to Italy, which was renewed in 1955. By the mid 1950s, Greenstone had developed a strong abstract style which she explored in prints, watercolors, and collages.

Greenstone began exhibiting throughout the East Coast at this time, and she was included in the Brooklyn Museum Annual Print Show, the Whitney Museum Annual, and the Pittsburgh International. Between her years in Italy and the time she settled down in Park Slope, Brooklyn and began teaching at the Pratt Institute, she lived in several far-flung places, including Caracas, California, and Canada.

Her travels connected her to many art communities; consequently in the 1960s and 70s, she had solo exhibitions at the Bridge Gallery and the Sixth Estate Gallery in New York, the Long Island University, the Dorothy Cameron Gallery of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario, and the Albert White Galleries of Toronto. In the late 1970s, she was included in the Brooklyn Museum Works on Paper exhibition and was awarded a mural commission for a branch of the New York Public Library in Queens. Her works can be seen in the permanent collections of the Gallery of London, Ontario; the Queen's College, Kingston, Ontario; Exxon Corp, New York; the Barclay Hotel, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario,Toronto; the New York City College; the Brooklyn College Collection and the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey. She passed away in 2005.

Source:  Bryony Roberts, mariongreenstone.com