For many years, Bernice Faegenburg’s sensitive brushwork has graced the contemporary art scene to gift viewers pieces showing strong affinities to Asian painting while also daring experimentation in digital photography. The cumulative results are a varietal cornucopia of mesmerizing images. She has maintained a consistent presence in the New York art world with solo exhibits at Viridian Artists, along with increasing her international audience through group shows. Her love for nature and experimentation is paramount in what she does, figuratively expanding the proverbial picture plane in poetic iterations, always approaching her craft instinctively, allowing images to grow from daily experience where process is as important as outcome.
A graduate of the Tyler School of Fine Arts, she studied with Robert Yasuda and explored Asian culture under painter Jerry Okimoto’s tutelage. He was a mentor for her, his signature style mirroring Color Field Painting. Faegenburg absorbed Okimoto’s philosophy. Living on Long Island, she is cognizant of that geography’s natural beauty foundationally influencing her pictorial skills.
She has been part of the invitation-only Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy, three different times, and is also represented in the permanent collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New York, along with having been reviewed by Helen Harrison and Phyliss Brass of the New York Times, and highlighted by Newsday and La Review Moderne, among other venues. Some accolades have been the First Prize Peacock Showcase Award from the Chelsea Center of the Nassau County Office of Cultural Development, the Bell Kramer Memorial Award, the Owens Zlowe Award for Painting at the Centennial Exhibition through the National Association of Women Artists and the Henningsen Memorial Prize. She has also been featured in the 15th edition of Who’s Who of American Women.
Faegenburg’s art, incorporating East and West sensibilities, presents us with artwork that blends acrylics with complex textures, while others follow a more atmospheric path. Two pieces, Hot Sake and Come for Tea particularly underscore her Asian sympathies.
Her painting of gathering cumulonimbus clouds entitled 6:05 AM is created in a luscious rosy tint that underneath portends drenching downpours, a deceptive adjunct to her intense Dark of Winter with its Franz Klinesque intense strokes. Visual counterpoints to these are the gesturally light-filled Hampton Pines that recall, for me, happy memories of hours hiking “the island’s” windswept East End and Reflection of the Pool is an organic abstract study in movement, personally conjuring my happiness when I was able to swim in the salty Atlantic surf.
The triptych Renewal, a “tour de force” of green pigment and dancing graphic details, arouses my senses with its spontaneity so that Spring is almost tangible. The artist paints a tiny bird, delicately rendered to anticipate a lovely coming season, promising new life and hope for the future.
We recently celebrated Earth Day, a time to pause from daily routine to savor our planet’s miraculous existence in a vast galactic sea, our small, sacred blue orb filled with air, and abundant life suspended in an inscrutable cosmos. Bernice Faegenburg generously treats us to pictorial enthralling marvels in her Viridian Artists exhibit,”Four Seasons,” May 12-30, a galactic infinitude singing a refrain out of time to assist our imperfect human understandings. G&S
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