MARIELLA BISSON

Medium Rare
February 25th through April 23rd

About Mariella Bisson

My images of water, rocks and trees are filled with purposeful energy. Water is in constant motion, just as our own footsteps are endlessly moving, circling, coming and going, leaving and returning. Forces of nature compete and collide. Shapes within my compositions push against one another, intertwine, overlap and recede into space. Sunlight, as it plays across landscape forms, invites contrast in darkness and calls to the colors in shade and shadows. I achieve a deep three-dimensional space with the use of overlapping and application of colors – from light to dark with all stops in between and from warm to cool. I make my large mixed media paintings based on field drawings and watercolors painted on site in nature. I find essential shapes to convey my story and then apply paper collage glued to the linen over custom stretchers or on wood panels. An archival sealant is applied to prepare the paper to receive oil paint. My final surface of oil paint gives my work depth and finish.

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I seek the universal in choosing my compositions. I want people to understand what they are seeing and relate it to their own lives – even subconsciously, feeling its energy in their own bodies or comparing the “characters” they see – rocks, trees, streams, roots, foliage - to aspects of their own experience, their own struggle for survival, their feelings of being rooted in home or routine, the flow and resistance they might encounter in life. We are all standing on one planet. The rivers of the earth and the clouds above are all one system, always changing, part of everyone’s experience, ever beautiful, in constant motion

Selected Awards and Honors

1990 and 2014/15 - Three years of support from the Pollock Krasner Foundation
2012 - NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship in Painting
2019 - Grant from the Joseph Robert Foundation
2020 - Grant from the Rauschenberg Foundation
Also awarded grants from Gottlieb Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg’s CHANGE Foundation, the Artists Fellowship, The Dutka Foundation and the Vogelstein Foundation.

Selected Collections

Richemont Corporation
Philip Morris
Pfizer
Perkins & Coie LLP
Wedge Capital Management
The Bessemer Trust
EKS&H - a financial services provider
Albemarle Corporation
Talisman
People’s Natural Gas
Dun and Bradstreet
Standard & Poor's
Memorial Sloan Kettering in NYC and New Jersey
The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
The North Georgia Health Service Hospital at Braselton GA
Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, Vermont
The Jack Byrne Center for Palliative and Hospice Care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, NH
Orange County Regional Medical Center in Middltown, NY
The Levine Cancer Center in Charlotte NC
The Portland Oregon Fertility Clinic
The Gelsenkirchen City Museum, Germany
Zimmerli Museum in New Jersey