- A beautiful monograph presenting the work of landscape artist Mary Sipp-Green - The collection contains 85 paintings reproduced in full color, spanning her career to date American landscape painter Mary Sipp-Green, based in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, is superlative in her ability to pull in the viewer and transfer the accompanying emotions in her atmospheric landscapes and seascapes. The intensely saturated colors in her works evoke an immediate sense of place and a privileged window on an intimate tableau. Sipp-Green achieves an ethereal, nuanced quality to her paintings that imparts a refined, inimitable serenity. Many of the subjects she paints - salt marshes, barns, meadows, rivers, and the occasional cityscape - are captured in the beautiful light of dusk or a luminescent sunrise. The effect is dreamy yet grounded and emotive. Sipp-Green states, While my preferred medium has always been oil on linen, my methods, techniques, and aesthetic aims have all undergone significant transformations since I first began. I learned my craft in the studio, painting still-lifes and portraits, as well as landscapes drawn directly from nature. Over time, I became increasingly engaged with more abstract and spiritual aspects of the landscape form and I began to pursue a less representational, more expressive style. When describing the 'diffuse quality of color, ' she explains, I use many layers of paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. Along the way, the surface of the paint is often refigured in unpredictable ways, and there is much that has to be scraped, sanded, destroyed and reapplied before the essence of a place, its mood and atmosphere finally emerges onto the canvas.
About the Author: Beth Venn is an independent curator and art historian who lives and works in New York City. Previously, she was curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and senior curator of the department of American Art at The Newark Museum. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, she was associate curator of the Permanent Collection and later director of their branch museums. Louis Zona, PhD, is the executive director and chief curator of The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH.