Description

We wish we had more paintings by Yolanda Fusco.  This is all we have, but it is a beauty:  an abstracted watercolor on paper.  The scene is likely of Monhegan Island where she spent her summers painting and exhibiting.  The colors she used here are just beautiful.

Details

• Yolanda Fusco (Czech/American, 1920-2009)
• Untitled landscape
  
• Watercolor on paper
  
• Signed lower right hand corner
  
• 25 1/2 " x 31 1/2" (overall) in black wooden frame

About the Artist

Born Yolanda Orminska in Czechoslovakia in 1920, Fusco emigrated to NYC at the age of 10.  She said in an interview that "when I came to this country, I always sketched and drew, but I didn’t really paint. The principal in the school in New York said he was going to get an art teacher. She came in and picked six children – I was one of them – put us up against easels, gave us paint and paper, and said, ‘Paint whatever you like.’ So I was homesick, and I painted a little girl in a field picking flowers, with the mountains in the background, and they sent it in to the Wanamaker contest in New York. It got third prize.  So then they decided I had to be a painter." After high school, she won a full scholarship to the Art Students League where she studied with Ernest Fiene, Harry Sternberg, and Vaclav Vytlacil.  She also studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and worked in textile design.  She was encouraged by fellow artists to visit Monhegan Island in Maine in 1959, immediately fell in love, and thereafter spent every summer until her death in 2009 on the island. In her late 80s she developed macular degeneration.  This condition forced her to change her style from painting portraits and landscapes to abstract compositions in bright colors.  Fusco's works was included in the University of New England Art Gallery's 2007 show, On Island: Women Artists of Monhegan.

Fusco had a poet's sensibility and spoke eloquently about her views on art in an interview with the Bangor Daily News in 2007:

“Like poetry, a painting should be the essence of thought and vision. That’s how I feel about it... I’m a realist. I love human beings. I love landscapes. I love things that grow. I love gardens...Cezanne has a tiny bit in the Museum of Modern Art, and it's just a tree branch and those leaves live. This is what I try to catch. Not the scene as it really is, but I want to catch the mood, the whole spirit. That's why I like poetry.  Poets don't put in every detail. They give you the feeling, something to think about. And painting to me is the same way. I'm not interested in just representing a house. I want the story, the thing that moves me, whether a cliff or a tree, or any living thing."