Word: bishops
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics and collectors disagree with her. Isabel Bishop's paintings hang in more than a dozen of the country's top museums; when a Manhattan gallery last week staged her first show of oils in ten years, it had to borrow almost half of the show from previous buyers. A painstaking worker, Bishop finishes only four or five paintings a year...
...they all had the vague shimmer of reflections in a forest pool. Their subject was almost invariably girls, mainly girls who spend their nights in Brooklyn and Queens rooming houses and their days working in the garment lofts, offices and novelty factories around Manhattan's Union Square, where Bishop has her studio...
...worn, plump, pallid figures never looked posed; they were painted as Bishop had first sketched them, in the park or subway or on the street, licking ice-cream cones, reading newspapers, chatting on park benches. There was no glamour in Bishop's handling of them, and no heavy realism either. Her models might be too rumpled and dispirited for Vogue magazine, but they shared a dreamlike solemnity and detachment that is seldom found on the street...
...Artist Bishop freely admits her subject-matter is limited. "I try to limit content, to limit everything," she explains, "in order to get down to something in my work. You know, I'm glad this isn't one of the great periods of art. I could never paint a great subject, and the fun about painting today is that we don't have to. We can paint the little things, things that perhaps no one noticed before...
Like Birds. One such "little thing" in Bishop's new show was a picture of a girl bending to drink from a fountain in Union Square. "I've got pages & pages of sketches of men and girls drinking out of that fountain," she says. "You know, most people lift one leg when they drink. Some put their hands behind them. Others embrace the bowl. But it's so quick and nice - nice-like birds, they drink and fly away - and I have a devil of a time. You could easily pose a person there, of course...