Passionate Inscription -The Monotypes of Abbie Winson

By
Suzi Winson


About Monotypes

             Abbie Winson, (January 1,1926-March 26,2013), loved the relationship between paint and paper. Abbie saw everything in terms of dynamic-- what the paint did to the paper, how the paper informed the paint, and how colors pushed and pulled at each other. The Monotypes were a great vehicle for Abbie, having much to do with these relationships and having other interesting constraints /benefits of equipment and community. She experimented with the form with art world pals Petra Tamboer and Andrew Franck. These prints were done in the 80's and 90's. She incorporated her inscriptive, calligraphic gestures into the Monotypes, sometimes as an after-thought, in an actionpainterly way, always interested in the movement of the process. Some of the prints also layer in Cubist abstractions as well as collisions of figures and landscape.

             A Monotype is a print made by painting on a smooth non-absorbent surface, as in glass or acrylic, transferred to paper using a printing press -- or inking an entire surface and creating a subtractive image. They are works on paper, 1.5' X 2.5', images have an off white border, not shown in these reproductions.

             The collection was displayed at Passionate Inscription---The Monotypes of Abbie Winson in July 2015 at Art and Circuses Gallery in Long Island City, NY. There are about 200 Monotypes; some are available for acquisition. Photos of Monotypes are by Rachael Shane Photography.

Monotypes - AB EX

Monotypes - AB EX Series


Monotypes - Black and White

Monotypes - Black and White Series


Monotypes - Charcoal Abstractions

Monotypes - Charcoal Abstractions Series


Monotypes - Charcoal and Figures

Monotypes - Charcoal and Figures Series


Monotypes - Inscriptive

Monotypes - Inscriptive Series


Monotypes - NY School

Monotypes - NY School Series


Monotypes - Passionate

Monotypes - Passionate Series


Monotypes - Primary Monotypes

Monotypes - Primary Monotypes Series

About Abbie

ABBIE WINSON lived life as a persistent scholar, an innovative painter, a woman of enormous wit and charm, a femme fatale and truly one of the great original thinkers of her time. Her paintings are powerful, evocative statements. They are highly rhythmic and forceful, suggesting figures and objects in passionate dynamic relationship.

Abbie was born in 1926 in Pittsburgh, moving to Philadelphia, then to the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Her vast and varied early education included Music and Art High, the Arts Students League, Queens College, Le Grand Chaumier, and then the Sorbonne in Paris, where she studied medicine, shifting her interests to anatomy and medical illustration. She spoke fluent and nuanced French.

Abbie studied painting with Hans Hofmann, Vaclav Vytlacil, Morris Kantor, Don Stacy, and Leon de Leeuw, in New York and was greatly influenced by the modernists and abstract expressionists, but developed her own dynamic and calligraphic style. Always a progenitor in her intellectual, artistic, and personal pursuits, Abbie did mixed-media paintings before the term was coined. She learned typesetting from Sy Winson, another pioneer in a new field with whom she had three children and eventually married. She then got a pair of master's degrees, one in Fine Arts, the other in an emerging category, Special Education.

She taught Art, Science, Math, and learning-disabled children. She became involved with computer graphics in its infancy, working on early model mainframe computers with systems so complex that Abbie became the traveling worldwide user guide. She left the field declaring, "Come to think of it, I don't really like figures revolving in space."

Primarily, Abbie loved to paint and returned often to large acrylic canvases and watercolors and ink with collage. She exhibited in group and solo shows in New York City with much acclaim. Moving towards collaboration, she worked with NY art and fashion director, Dwayne Resnick, and explored the synergy of bold, agitating movement of clothing and visual art, the results of which were displayed in several stories of windows on Madison Avenue.

In her 70's, she took up Chinese calligraphy and the Mandarin language. She traveled to Beijing and collaborated with local painters in ink on paper, as well as fleetingly in soapy water with a long brush on pavement. In her 80's, she frequently travelled to the Midi-Pyrénées region of France to paint with her friend and former painting student, Petra Tamboer, in a stone barn in Touffailles, developing a modern artist's retreat.

She worked with her daughter Suzi, son Robert and family art instigator, Brad Miskell, on cover and interior art for modern poetry books, and worked alongside daughter Julie on a soft sculpture on wheels installation of art and monsters (also with Petra) in her beloved Touffailles.

Her most recent work was part of Circus Warehouse's Aerial Text Experiments 2011,combining text and aerial art for the beginnings of a world-wide poetry movement 100,000 Poets for Change, developed by editor/publisher/social activist /Big Bridge editor, Michael Rothenberg. She projected her black and white paintings over dancers and acrobats (in sync with what is now The Hybrid Movement Co. of NY) of the Nouveau Cirque movement.

RARIFIED AIR, a retrospective of 70 years of Abbie's work, showed at Art and Circuses Gallery which was formed in her honor from June 9, 2013 to June 9, 2014.

Abbie in Touffailles

Abbie in Touffailles

Abbie looking at paint and paper

Abbie looking at paint and paper

Abbie Travelling

Abbie Travelling

From Her Art World Collaborators

PETRA TAMBOER
La Grange
Toufailles, France

I remember she talked about [monotypes] and doing this with Andrew [Franck], you better ask him. That was before we met (August/December 1993) I remember she would do some monoprint life drawings directly on metal in [Leon] De Leeuw's class....

Abbie came around 1999 at [La Grange], working on big heavy paper (43 x 36) . She would mix pastels, watercolour, ink, oilstick and gouaches, using 'impossible' combinations sometimes,... the gouaches would [fall off once] dried on the pastels or oilsticks, she would look at it with astonishment, interested in the underlaying skin and would paste silkpaper on other parts. We very often had laughs working together, when I would scream "stop Abbie it's enough! ", being in a more 'less is more' idea. Abbie, always full of energy, just looked up said 'mmmh' and went on....

From that time she came almost every year and sometimes twice.

During the years the paper became smaller (29x22 then 20x14) but gestures still large, coming out of the paper, with less different material but still full of colour, I assisted her putting them together in bigger compositions, that was playtime, we always seemed to agree

Mai 2011 the last time she came with Julie [Abbie's daughter] , she worked in black and white, small paper, beautiful light.. energy.... almost [ ethereal ]...

I miss her.

ANDREW FRANK
Woodstock, NY

I remember most of the monotypes shown since they're from the time Abbie and I would meet at Montclair College and work /play on the printing press.

This happened over the course of months. Abbie knew when the printing room would be free from classes and student use: usually about 9:30 am till noon, sometime midweek. I drove from the city, got coffee for us, whereupon we'd talk about color tones through weather, transparency, synesthesia, Bonnard, Hans Hoffmann, Delmore Schwartz, bad art, etc... Basically we'd alternate doing our work, often in silence, simply looking at what was trying to emerge.

Here and there a word would be uttered, or a lewd remark. Or a rhapsody on space would surface as we worked side by side; Abbie would broadly brush oils onto the zincs plates we had carefully burnished and prepared beforehand; in a few gestures, she'd stop, mull, continue and violà I'd help line up the plate, paper, felt, etc. before pressing... afterwords placing the sheet on a drying tray. Next it'd be my turn for the press.

Since my interest was toward an experience of negative pressure shown through pressure, I directly emulsified oil and water on paper before printing. Not really having had any formal art training, my host of "mistakes" delighted her. We'd inspect and deliberate about the work, doing as many as four or more pieces at a time, then leave it all to dry till the following week. In short, we had a blast.

A few years ago I attempted to set Abbie up to do some monotypes here in Woodstock (a local artist with a great press offered) but unfortunately health and logistics had their stubborn way. We often squeezed hands or held back a tear, saying Robert [Abbie's late son, Andrew's close friend] would be delighted with our antics.

LINKS


Art + Circuses Gallery
http://artandcircuses.com

To purchase Abbie's work suzi@circuswarehouse.com
to know more about Aerial Text Experiments:
http://circuswarehouse.com/2014/08/aerial-text-experiments/

Petra Tamboer http://petratamboer.com/index.php/en/
Andrew Franck http://www.andrewfranck.net/Home.html

Brad Miskell http://theworkofbrad.com

Rachael Shane Photography
http://rachaelshane.wix.com/rachaelshanephotography#

Thank you to Michael Rothenberg for inviting Abbie to participate in Big Bridge. She would have been honored.

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