Jane Culp
Jane Culp
Echoes of the San Andreas: Paintings and Drawings
Jane Culp’s muscular paintings and drawings make palpable the rush she feels when on location interacting with nature. From her modernist perspective she conveys a powerful sense of the moment using surface tension and movement. "I’m interested in the life and language of form," she explains. "How form talks as it goes into space, how light and distance swallow and selectively magnify the forms, how a rhythmic movement in space releases forms that change direction, split, bulge, and fall back into space." Working in harsh weather conditions that force her to strap her easel to her knees, Culp explores wilderness terrain along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, transporting viewers from her home base north of the Anza-Borrego Desert, through Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks, up to Tioga Pass, and into Yosemite Valley.
The profusely and beautifully reproduced paintings comprising Jane Culp: Echoes of the San Andreas: Paintings and Drawings perfectly showcase the impressive artistic talents of an American artist.
Jane Culp's journey as an artist began in St. Louis, Missouri, and segued through Yale University when the reign of abstract expressionism yielded to pop art. By the mid-1980s she was dividing her time between New York, San Francisco, and Southern California. Married to New York painter and critic Louis Finkelstein, Culp lived most of the year in Manhattan and summered near the Delaware Water Gap, where they both painted the surrounding landscape. In 2009, after Finkelstein died, Culp moved full-time to an off-grid cabin and studio she built on sixty acres of California high desert that she has transformed into a sanctuary for birds and animals. Stanley Lewis is a painter living in Leeds, Massachusetts, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught for more than forty years, including at Kansas City Art Institute, Smith College, American University, and New York Studio School, and he summers at Chautauqua.
