Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Isabel Bigelow

Discipline: Visual Art – painting
Region: Ghent, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2002
Isabel Bigelow is an American painter and printmaker. Finding fertile ground in the space between abstraction and representation, Bigelow closes in on familiar elements. Trees, fences, islands, and forests disappear or come sharply into view as they vie for attention with the surrounding atmosphere. The material evolution of the works is essential to their realization. The surface of the panel is slowly built up to provide a textural support for thin veils of color applied in layers. Each layer is restrained yet sumptuous, softly mingling with the layer underneath lending a diaphanous effect to the atmosphere of the painting. A graduate of Harvard University and the Maryland Institute College of Art, Bigelow has exhibited throughout the United States. Her work is in the collections of The Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Yale University Art Gallery; The New York Public Library; the University of Virginia; and the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ. She has been awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and residencies at MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Millay.

Studios

Cheney

Isabel Bigelow worked in the Cheney studio.

Cheney Studio was given to MacDowell by Mrs. Benjamin P. Cheney and Mrs. Karl Kauffman. Like Barnard Studio, Cheney is a low, broadly massed bungalow. Sited on a steep westward slope, its porches are supported on wooden posts and fieldstone with lattices. Although it still retains its appealing character, the original design of the shingled building…

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