My career as a painter began in 2008 after a successful 30+ -year stint as a magazine creative director for national consumer magazines: among them Redbook, TV Guide, Parents, Health, More and Modern Farmer. Rather than return to school for an MFA, I chose to study with various artists whose work I admired, taking workshops in many locations around the world with Annie Lapin, Claire Sherman, Donald Elder, Ilana Manolson, Kate McGloughlin, Nuala Clarke and others.
My work has evolved from an initial exploration of translucent figures in landscapes to a more intuitive and abstract response to the natural world. My goal is to create imagery with mood, ambiguity and richness, balancing opposing forces: smooth vs textured surfaces, flat vs dimensional space, man-made vs. organic shapes, neutral vs. vibrant hues, light vs. deep values, transparency vs. opacity. I use smooth substrates—Yupo paper or gessoed hardboard panels—and a wide variety of tools to mine as many delicious possibilities of the effect of paint on surface. The deep box panels I work on give the pieces a quality of ‘thing-ness’, acting more as created objects than pictures. The works are usually layered, scraped back, and layered again as I find the composition with a combination of intention and accident, control and chaos. Recent work contrasts this chaos with large, hard-edged areas of brilliant or metallic color, and has turned into a series dedicated to environmentally challenged regions (see recent paintings, the Terra Infirma series). My practice includes printmaking—monotypes mostly—which offer a way to explore further ideas for paintings, and collages made from recombining monotypes or painted papers. My involvement in the vibrant art community of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley currently includes chairing the board of WAAM, The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, which feeds my practice as well as my soul.
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Copyright disclaimer: All content and images used on this site are owned by me for use on this site only. Please respect that. However, if you wish to use any images for legitimate reasons, contact me at maxine.davidowitz@gmail.com. Happy to oblige, for good cause and/or for credit!