Description
- 2019
- Donated by: Artist
- Collage with sewn and marked papers & glitter
- 12?x 12"
Emily Fuller is a contemporary painter who finds subject matter in New York State?s Harlem River Valley in northeast Dutchess County. She was born in New York City and raised in Long Island. Her sensitivity to color, texture and composition was formed early in life by viewing her parents? copious plantings of flowering dogwood trees, rhododendron, laurel, azalea bushes, perennial flowerbeds, and vegetable gardens. Her grandmother, Lucy W. Hurry, a noted Long Island water color still life painter influenced her also. Emily studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where she received her BS in Art Education, the Art Students League, and School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Fuller learned the skill of sewing by making clothing at Garland Junior College (now part of Simons College) in Boston. She has been sewing paper and canvas work off and on since 1977 when she put together her first abstract paper and canvas pieces. In those pieces the artist sewed one slightly smaller piece of paper or canvas on top of another sometimes using the sewing of lines with tread to express a pattern. Using wood working tools on the paper and glue on the canvas, she made marks like animal tracks, planted garden rows, symbols for trees, and repetition in barn roofs on the surfaces. These marks linked to the landscape are continued in her current collage work.
Originally trained as an abstract artist, her collages allow her to use the abstract marks she has used over 30 years to combine abstraction with realistic photographic elements. In her landscapes she searches for the abstract in realistic views that she combines to make her landscapes more interesting. Color and calligraphy in the form of marks have always been a very important aspect of her work.
She paints out of doors in the spring, summer, & fall. In Dutchess County there is still land being used for agrarian purposes. The realistic paintings record the quiet views of planted fields, and distant mountains. Paintings are done on site during the planting and harvest seasons. They encompass vistas from hilltops and high ground that point up her interest in the almost abstract patterns of agricultural fields and tree rows in the landscape. For more than a century area farmers have alternated crops in blocked horizontal rows of corn, sorghum, soybeans, & alfalfa planted in horizontal bands across the hills of the area to protect the soil from erosion. These repetitious horizontal blocks of color and texture are appealing as subject matter.
The artist currently resides in New York City and northeast Dutchess County, NY