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Artist Exhibitions:
LOIS Di COSOLA
Born: Lois Bock, Brooklyn,
New York; January 23, 1935
Telephone: (516) 822-5753
E-Mail:
loisdicosola@yahoo.com
Websites:
http://www.absolutearts.com/por
tfolios/l/loisd/
http://afonline.artistsspace.or
g/view_artist.php?aid=3599
Art Dealer: Galerie Aldonna
(212) 861-9318
Education
1950-53 Museum of
Modern ...
Further Information
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Artist Reviews:
LOIS Di COSOLA
The art of Lois DiCosola
becomes a unique window
through which can be seen the
magical visual poetry present
in our environment. Each of
her perceptions is a personal
thumbprint, bringing biology
and biography to our
awareness-it is nature,
properly seen, written with
abstract configurations.
A...
Further Information
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Collections:
Museum of Modern Art,New York
City,USA; Library of
Congress,Washington D.C.;
Guild Hall
Museum,Easthampton,New
York,USA; and many public and
private collections
internationally....
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Reviews:
LOIS Di COSOLA
The art of Lois DiCosola
becomes a unique window
through which can be seen the
magical visual poetry present
in our environment. Each of
her perceptions is a personal
thumbprint, bringing biology
and biography to our
awareness-it is nature,
properly seen, written with
abstract configurations.
A...
Further Information
|
|
Collections:
Museum of Modern Art,New York
City,USA; Library of
Congress,Washington D.C.;
Guild Hall
Museum,Easthampton,New
York,USA; and many public and
private collections
internationally....
Further Information
|
|
Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Lois Di Cosola
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Artist Statement for Lois Di Cosola
When Willem De Kooning and I met we recognized in each other the same ancient formal passion for packing onto our own private cave walls, a panoply of personal archaeological finds through the materiality of paint."
I feel that a lifetime of being a painter has given me an ever deepening receptivity to my own inner resources, and
when you have worked long enough, you can lose that sense of effort- your hands and mind work in unison- where, like a seasoned mountain climber, you keep going, despite the danger.
The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum became an important part of my early art education. The entrance to the Brooklyn museum was a few yards away from the Eastern Parkway subway station, and across the street from my art school, so I was able to spend time in the galleries before classes. The collections were deeply inspirational, and I was fascinated by the arts of Egypt- Asian sculpture, ceramics, the native American galleries, masks, and beautiful beadwork, and of course the museum‘s exhibitions and collections of paintings. During my art student years, studio workshops included graphic design, the book production arts, woodblock, linocut and monoprinting- painting, and life drawing. I graduated in January of 1953, on my eighteenth birthday- my school was Prospect Heights, formerly called Girl’s Commercial, and my teachers were working artists themselves and aware of the new currents in contemporary art. In 1952 I was given a scholarship grant to the Museum of Modern Art’s Saturday young people’s painting workshop, and as I entered the museum for the first time, I was amazed by the paintings of the modernists- Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Klee, Picasso.
Perhaps the best time to begin to study art is during adolescence. One sees innocently still- together with the sadness of leaving childhood. This transition into the teen years carries with it inner riches for the young artist. In 1953 I also received the Augustus Saint-Gaudens medal, as well as the Carnegie Fine Art Institute scholastic award. Art Kane, then art director of Seventeen magazine, selected my ink and watercolor drawing for the ‘It’s All Yours’ International award, and after its publication in the June 1953 issue of Seventeen magazine, it was selected once again for the ‘Art Directors Club’s 33rd Annual Exhibition,’ in 1954, where it was given another award for Editorial art. This exhibition, shown in the Associated American Artists Galleries in New York City, then traveled internationally for several years. I remember the statement I made for Seventeen magazine...“I believe that art should bring out the essence of the subject and not imitate its physical properties...” This remains a kind of mantra for me.
This was at the midpoint of the 20th Century, and the New York School artists were experimenting with painting in new ways Though few works were available for public viewing, I remember having felt the pulse of the time- when in 1951 I made Emergence, a small abstract gouache, ink and wax painting. I have heard it said that the esthetic climate the artist arrives in continues to inform him/her throughout their life. This has been my matrix, and from adolescence to today, my work, whether abstract or figurative, has reflected the sensibility- the texture of this time.
In the fall of 1960 I painted in Richard Pousette-Dart’s painting workshop at the New School for a few months He truly enjoyed seeing the variety of ways young painters developed their own style. I saw Richard for the last time when I visited him at the Art Student’s League, in the early 1990’s,where he was teaching -his students were as busily creative in his class then as we were over 40 years before. My friend, the art historian, Saul Levine came into my life in 1961- he saw my ink drawings and oil paintings and decided to form a small group of artists, where we met to discuss our work. Saul had a real feeling for abstraction- its emotive and fluid forms. A professor of art history at Fairleigh-Dickinson, and arts writer, Saul wrote an essay about my work-- he is known for his book on the David--'Artibus et Historiae- Michelangelo's David.'
Lois DiCosola autobiographical narrative page 2 of 5
Paintings I made from 1960 to 1964 were shown in several exhibitions, where another series of awards were presented to me. In 1961 I received first prize in watercolor painting at Hofstra University, where I later taught. Victor D’Amico of the Museum of Modern Art, awarded my mixed media drawing, Drawing for Matador, first prize in 1963. That same year I showed three oil paintings- Swingthings, Matador, Tokaido, and several drawings at the Guild Hall Museum in Easthampton, Long Island, where I was awarded an exhibition at the museum for the following year by Harold Rosenberg, Larry Rivers and Adolph Gottlieb.
For the ‘Award Winner’s Exhibition’ the following year, I showed a series of oils titled For the Dutch Masters, which I painted during 1963, and several brush paintings from my Windows1series.The awardees, besides myself, were, Perle Fine, Mary Abbott and Anne Kroll. Each of us had one quarter of Guild Hall’s exhibition space. At the opening, James Brooks, with Elaine Varian, the director of Finch College Museum’s contemporary wing, asked me to be his selection for the upcoming exhibition, ‘Artists Select.’ One of the Dutch Masters paintings and a portrait drawing were shown in that exhibition in the fall of 1964.
Also, during that year I received three awards from Daniel Robbins, then curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in two different shows- one for the painting, House of Grapes, later re-titled Vineyard, shown at the Hecksher Museum, and two others at Hofstra University’s Emily Lowe gallery- now its museum, for Matador and Drawing for Matador. Then curator of the Whitney Museum, Edward Bryant, also gave me an award in painting. In that same year, Matador was shown once again, this time in the New York Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. I was also exhibiting work in an invitational at the Camino Gallery and as a member of the Aegis on 10th Street, where there was a flurry of gallery openings on Tuesday nights. Black Friday and Germination were exhibited in two of the shows. Members of the Camino, Alice Neel, Elaine De Kooning, John Curoi and Elaine Booth Selig among others, also exhibited paintings in this show.
In 1965, while traveling through the country and into Mexico, where I observed the art of the Aztecs, I made several small paintings, using acrylics, so that the color could be more brilliant, paint flatter and the forms more precise. This developed into a large series of geometric abstractions. In the summers of 1967, ‘68 and ‘69 I worked in the sculpture studios in the University of California at Berkeley art department, where I made resin inserts for Aquarius and Yellowjack- two large pieces, where I combined painted canvas and sculpture. Because I was not comfortable with resin, I began to use plexiglas instead for the centers, on which I painted the designs. I had the sculptural inserts for Aquarius fabricated- the plexiglas was heated, bent and shaped. Chamber, Pink Unfolding, Conifor and Convolver are also part of this series. In January of 1970, Aquarius, Yellowjack, and Apollo were shown in ‘X 12‘, at Museum, a Project for Living Artists, in New York City. After these works were completed, I made a series of wall pieces called Foldings, where I folded and drew long charcoal marks onto heavy duck canvas, then painted over the folds and drawings with rubber latex, which today, decades later, has taken on a beautiful golden patina.
John Cage invited me, together with Al Hansen to do a performance piece on television in 1959- at this time painters were very involved in doing multimedia performances. In 1965, we created theatre pieces at Robert Rauschenberg’s beautifully transformed mission church on Lafayette Street, as part of his presentations at New York University. For this I designed Crucifixion. Peter Moore took the photographs. Then, in 1970 I did mixed media performances with Isamu Kawai at 30 East 14th, across from Union Square, and performances and films with Jack Smith at the Plaster Foundation on Greene and Grand in SoHo. We set off for Coney Island, where Jack filmed Sinbad, using my 35 mm camera. Some of the stills and my drawing for his Hamlet play were included in the PS I retrospective of his work. I was also in ‘The Liberated Laundromat‘- a little gem of a film by Harry Smith made from a concept by Stella Waitzkin. Jonas Mekas acquired the film for the Cinematheque collection, along with Jack’s ‘Flaming Creatures.’
Lois DiCosola autobiographical narrative page 3 of 5
I have also made portraits, photographs, films and drawings of Ray Johnson, Lee Krasner, Al Hansen, John Cage, Michael Jackson, Alan Vega, Stella Waitzkin, Kawai, the fashion designer, Charles James, Taylor Mead, Bob Rauschenberg, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Elaine Booth Selig, John Payne, Doloris Holmes, my husband, Leonardo, my son, Leonard Jr., my grandson, Justin, Ibram Lassaw, Lee Krasner, CC Wong, and Jack Smith, among others, and series of drawings and photo essays. Life Actually is a series of ongoing photographs, and Solagrams are photo collages, painted with computer generated color.
In the fall of 1969, just having moved to East 82nd Street in New York City, Elaine Selig called to talk about a new children’s television show called Sesame Street. She was the graphic arts director, and invited me to come and make some drawings, which were aired, then published in ‘The Sesame Street Book of Puzzlers.’ At this time, I visited Henry Pearson, who saw my Aquarius series of paintings that were to be in the X12 show. Together, we made geometric drawings at the New School. Also, Howard Daum, whose studio was near mine on 14th street, made several pen and ink portraits of me at this time.
Though it would seem that a feminist art exhibition would not have been for me, because I already had a career as a professional working and exhibiting artist, beginning in the early 1950’s, by the time of my involvement in X12, and though many of my peers were female, as well as male art directors, artists and critics, I felt that it was critical to accept the invitation at this time. Some of us were seasoned artists, while others were younger and newer to the world of art. The blend gave a sense of the passion of artists who were women in a very special way- the public saw the many kinds of creative expressions and styles by women of different ages and experiences. In a New York Times magazine article, Grace Glueck acknowledged X12 as being the first feminist art exhibition. Lawrence Alloway, also wrote about the show in his article, ‘Women’s Art in the Seventies,’ for Art in America, and Cindy Nemser wrote one of the first reviews for Arts magazine in the February 1970 issue, calling the show, "a potpourri of excitement."
Today, ‘X12- X to the Twelfth Power,‘ formed in the fall of 1969, and which opened in January of 1970 at Museum- a loft at 729 Broadway, in New York City, is known as the pioneer feminist art exhibition- the show that paved the way for future feminist exhibitions. The definitive publication, called ‘Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975‘, was published in 2007 by the University of Illinois press, and edited by Barbara Love- (my bio appears on page 118)- is housed in the Sophia Smith collection in the archives at Smith College, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, the Smithsonian, and many other libraries and research centers internationally. X12 is also listed in the Brooklyn Museum Feminist Center’s online timeline.
From my Chelsea Hotel studio and Studio X on 14th Street I made drawings, etchings, lithographs, books and films. ‘Notes from the Hotel Chelsea,’ begun in 1970, is a mixed media xerography book. Among other books there are- In Line, The Artist and Herself, Beautiful Free Women, Mountain Woman, Asian Women, Hands, Botanica- in six volumes, Cielo e Mar and a book of self portraits made on the way to my sixtieth birthday in 1994. The Museum Drawings are done while traveling- they are pen and ink, and pencil and watercolor drawings, made in museums in New York, Mexico, and Europe. I find making books to be enjoyable, very intimate- a place where I can combine images together with some of my poems and writings.
My etchings and stone and plate lithographs were done at the Pratt Graphics Center workshop on Broadway, in downtown New York, .from 1973 to 1975. The loft across from the Pratt workshop was Elaine and Willem De Kooning’s old studio, where Elaine still lived, and where she was painting wonderful portraits. In 1977, while also teaching in the etching department at Suny- Old Westbury, I printed in Donn Steward’s etching workshop, at the on Long Island, and made the Moonlight aquatint etchings at this time- one of which is now in the Guild Hall Museum permanent print collection- Phyllis Braff presented the etchings to the Guild Hall Museum Collections committee, and Moonlight 1 was shown Lois DiCosola autobiographical narrative page 4 of 5
in curator, Judith Wolfe’s exhibition, ‘Prints from the Permanent Collection,‘ at Guild Hall, in 1980. Among others, this exhibition included prints by Willem DeKooning, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Lee Krasner, Alphonso Ossorio, Robert Gwathmey, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein. I loved my visits with Douglass Howell in his Bayville, Long Island studio, and later, on the East end- we enjoyed sharing our love for paper- he had made paper for Miro, Pollock and Lee Krasner- and I have made drawings and prints on the beautiful papers he gave me. Printmaking has been an extension of painting for me. Some of my earliest etchings and engravings, those from 1963, like Grasses, were done in hard and softground, aquatint, drypoint and engraving. I taught in the etching workshop at SUNY Old Westbury, and at Hofstra University, where I designed courses combining elements of the fine and graphic arts.
As a young child, while drawing a face with pastels my father bought for me, and placing in the lines with soft gentle movements, I began to see in it a kind of poetry. My father later recalled this and said to me;
“a great outpouring came through your hands... your pictures gave me a view of the spirit inside the child.” Besides portraits I have made from life, Ancestors, and the Pasqua portraits, begun in 1996, were most often made out of a kind of ‘tribal’ memory- these developed in much the same way a photograph appears in the dark room, but instead, by way of charcoal, pencil and paint. Helen Harrison has written that my heads are “reminiscent of the mysterious studies of Redon.” In 1982 I met Manuel De La Torre, the architect and art collector from Havana, Cuba, who began to collect my work. He and I became friends, and we delighted in talking about art. His art collection includes several of my Cherry Tree ink paintings, Vessels, the Mary drawings, a Moonlight aquatint etching, and a charcoal portrait I made of him.
Poetry and writing have always been a passion with me. I have written poems, short stories and several children’s stories over the years. John Payne often sent books and his poetry to me- his beautiful poem, ‘The Street,’ about 10th street- the artists, the openings, is a treasure. My friend, Walasse Ting came to New York city, from Paris by way of Shanghai, and coming into the New York world of Abstract Expressionism, his work became beautifully infused with a new version of flying ink. I became an arts writer and editor for Victor and Jamie Ellen Forbes’s Sunstorm Arts magazine, beginning in the mid 1970’s- doing artist’s interviews, stories and essays on art. For my 1982 exhibition, ’Portraits of Poets and Others,’ at the Bryant gallery in Roslyn, Long Island, and the Nassau County Museum, I read several of my poems, including Amore, Soutine, Drawing, Mr. Blue, and Roberto, my male model.. Poets read from their own work and from the poetry of the past during the course of the exhibition, in which I showed approximately fifty portraits. I was delighted that a favorite poet, Marie Ponsot was present.
I have also always loved drawing and painting figures, and even as my work became more abstract, I never abandoned the figure. My figure drawings and paintings from as early as 1951 remind me of how the body can be in motion or simply in reflective calm. Later work such as Beach 11, Mysteries Woman, Dialogues, Face and Figure, Nudes, Torsos, and the Pasqua series, for my mother, Pasqualina Filangeri, are all figurative works. Elaine Benson, showed eight of my Mysteries Woman paintings in her 1989 show, ‘Body Works,’ and my March 1991 brush paintings in 1991. In 1996, several of my Cats paintings were selected for one of her always delightful ‘Creatures’ exhibitions.
The landscape interests me for its amazing ever changing variety of forms- the stunning presences in nature. The Waters oil pastels of 1991, the River drawings of 1993, the March, May, Summer, October, Gardens, Wildflowers, Springflowers, Iris Garden, Birthday Roses, Nature Studies, and the Botanica oil drawings and sketchbooks made between l991 and l993 were all inspired by nature. The beautiful Japanese flowering cherry tree that stands outside my studio window was the subject for the Cherry Tree ink and watercolor paintings of the 1980‘s, but the Inisfada watercolors were painted plein air. Earlier, my 1950’s nature drawings and paintings were done in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and seascape watercolors were painted at Louse Point in Easthampton in 1965. The Southbeach 2000 oils were made in the studio, and recent books of oil pastel drawings at the Planting Fields on Long Island in 2003.Visiting Niagara Falls
Lois DiCosola autobiographical narrative page 5 of 5
for the first time in November of 2000 was for me, very inspirational. After arriving home I immediately
began to draw what I felt about this most extraordinary place, resulting in the Niagara paintings. The Cielo
e Mar paintings came after these and are in some way related. As for still life, they are usually studies made from observation- also, I have always had a special feeling for vessels- all kinds of pots used by people in every culture in the world- made out of clay, ceramic, glass, bronze. Vessels is a large series of imagined ink and mixed media paintings on paper, honoring this ancient art form.
Abstraction has engaged me throughout my life. It is poetic imagery based in imagination, rather than perception. Windows, Origins, Rhysmos, Canticles, Excavation and Frescoes are brush drawings and paintings, many of which are heavily layered, where each underlayer becomes a part of the painting’s history. The Lila series of gouache and pencil drawings was made in 1997. Recent series of paintings include Rosso, Blues, Breeze, Cold Spring Harbor, Jade, Goldrush, Ashes, Bayville, August, Arctic, and the Fall Blue, and Fall Pink series. The Poem Paintings seemed to have come out of the abstract ink paintings I had been making for so many years- here, I transcribed portions of my own poetry and lines from the work of women poets into calligraphic paintings.
A few hours after the towers fell at the World Trade Center, I began the first of the Towers and 9/11 Variations drawings- it was a most terrible time, and so the drawings and paintings were made with an emotionally charged gestural brushwork. Some of the images from this series have been shown in memorial exhibitions, including the Museum of the City of New York online gallery, the ‘Reactions’ show at Exit Art, and the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Life of the City’ exhibition. The ongoing Love and War drawings, Figurative Abstractions, and the Cantolena drawings are works that speak to world events.
Through it all, there is my ongoing love for painting and drawing that is about discovering pieces of the magic in the world we live in- but really know so little about----
Lois Bock DiCosola 2009 »
loisdicosola@yahoo.com
Tel: 516 822 5753
http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/l/loisd/
http://afonline.artistsspace.org/view_artist.php?aid=3599
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11326913@N07/
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