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Robyn Whitney Fairclough received her BFA degree in Painting from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA from Johnson State College, in a joint program with the Vermont Studio Center. She also attended: the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts; The University of Iowa Graduate School of Painting and Drawing; The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She has studied with Jake Berthot, Bernie Chaet, Charles Cajori, Jim Gahagan, Jim Lechay, Selina Trieff and Wolf Kahn.
Fairclough lives and works in Vermont. She has shown regularly both in and out of New York City, including The Prince Street Gallery, NYC; the David Findlay Gallery, NYC; the Barabra von Stechow Galerie in Frankfurt, Germany; The Thomas J. Walsh Gallery at Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT.; The South Wharf Gallery, Nantucket, MA; AVA Gallery, Lebanon, N.H.; the Montclair State University Art Gallery, Montclair, N.J.; Cheeseborough Ponds Gallery, Westport, CT; Stamford Museum, Stamford, CT; Silvermine Gallery, Silvermine Art Guild, New Caanan, CT; Julian Scott Gallery, Johnson State College, Johnson, VT; Merrill Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz; Pump House Gallery, Hartford, CT; Ethel Sergeant Gallery in Meriden, NH.
Vivien Raynor, in a review for the New York Times, made a special mention of Fairclough’s work exhibited in the Connecticut Artists Show at the Stamford Museum in 1995, and again in 2001, the Valley New (Hanover, NH) published a major article about her work. In 2004 two German publications, Frankfurt Allgemeine and the The Frankfurter Neue Presse, published reviews about Fairclough’s first solo exhibition in Germany. In June 2006 The Frankfurter Neue Presse made special mention of Fairclough’s recent exhibition at the Galerie Barabra von Stechow and special mention was made in the acclaimed Frank furter Allgemeine (June 28, 2006).
Fairclough is represented by The Prince Street Gallery in New York City. She is also represented by Island House Gallery in Nantucket, MA, The Southport Galleries, Southport, CT, and The Galerie Barbara von Stechow in Frankfurt, Germany, where she had her first solo exhibition in 2004 and second exhibition in 2006. She is represented by the von Stechow Galerie in Art Fairs in Cologne, Germany, as well as in Frankfurt. von Stechow Galerie represented Fairclough at the Palm Beach Art Fair in January 2007 and 2009. Fairclough was represented by the David Findlay Gallery on Madison Ave. in New York City for eight years up to its closing in 2009. She had three solo exhibitions at the David Findlay Gallery in 2002, 2005, and 2008. Fairclough recently had a comprehensive solo exhibition in September thru December 4th 2011 at Fairfield University’s Thomas J. Walsh Gallery where she exhibited twenty three paintings and fourteen drawings.
Fairclough’s work can be found in private collections throughout California, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Vermont as well Austria, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands.
Public Collections include reproductions of works in four books published by the Kodak company in Rochester, NY; a painting was purchased by Pane Vino Inc., Westport, CT., and in 2009 Martel Bistro in Fairfield, CT.
For additional information, please contact the artist at her studio at 212-741-1445.
www.robynwfairclough.com
Email Artist Robyn Whitney Fairclough
Please view the Artist’s Website at www.robynwfairclough.com
Artist Statement
In my work for the last forty five years, color and figure placement has been paramount, more critical than “what” I am painting. For the most part, what I paint arrives naturally for me because the subject is the world of which I am a part – my family, my environment, my garden – those close to me. They become my muse, my inspiration.
The activity of painting, the “process of,” is most crucial to me as an artist for it is in this process (the journey) that color, emotion, perception, and imagery emerge.
Upon entering the studio I don’t know how the painting is going to progress, or not, there is no plan. I aim to start anew each day – figure in, figure out, yellow in, yellow out – and so it goes. The process is a search, a quest for resolution. The painting has to work as a whole – every space, object, figure, affects the other – therefore, they need to work together to make the painting whole, complete, resolved. For me, this process/journey has to be experienced through an intuitive and fervent manner as well as an intellectual one. In the intellectual, the more cerebral position, I stand back from the painting and think, contemplate. I aim to make decisions that are based on what is working in the painting or what is not – again, it’s figure placement, colors, over-all structure and spirit that are crucial.
In the intuitive manner, I respond to the canvas by mark making, painting in a visceral non thinking way, unplanned and deep in the “process”.
It often takes me years to finish a painting; and sometimes a work does not get resolved. I paint over paintings, large and small – I frequently butcher them, they become overworked with no feeling of spontaneity or freshness.
Over the last several years I have learned, at the urging of a past professor, if frustrated, turn the painting around, against a wall – to not over paint, to not obliterate the entire image – to simply let it be for a while. After weeks, months or even years when I face the troubled painting again, I can often see a strength or a direction in the work that I did not see before.
The experience in my studio is an intense one – a search for meaning, for what moves me – for beauty, harmony and at times discourse.
At the end of the work day, regardless of what transpired in the studio, I experience that this mysterious activity of painting often feels like a dance, a dance between two voyages, the intuitive and the analytical – an experience I find most difficult and challenging, but also most astounding and provocative.
Robyn Whitney Fairclough