Discipline: Visual Art

Nell Blaine

Discipline: Visual Art
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1957
Nell Blaine (1922-1996) was an American painter best known for her brightly colored oils and watercolors. Painted in a loosely brushed style, her depictions of still lifes and landscapes have a casual yet poignant quality, similar to the works of Fairfield Porter, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, and Jane Freilicher. Blaine studied at the Richmond School of Art before moving to New York in 1942. In the city, she studied under the prominent abstract painters Hans Hofmann and Stanley William Hayter. In 1959, the artist contracted paralytic polio while visiting Mykonos Island in Greece. After eight months in a New York hospital, she was told she would never paint again. Though she used a wheelchair the rest of her life, intensive physical therapy had rehabilitated the use of her hands by 1960, and from then she would use her left hand to paint with oils, and her right hand to sketch and work on watercolors. Considered among the most important American landscape painters of the 20th century, her legacy includes a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 1986. Today, her works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Denver Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Studios

Alexander

Nell Blaine worked in the Alexander studio.

Originally designed to be a visual art gallery, this facility was built in memory of the late John White Alexander (1856-1915) and funded by Elizabeth Alexander and their son James. John White Alexander was highly regarded as a portrait painter and, in the early part of the 20th century, served…

Learn more