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seamlessly into one another, transformed and organized by a sense rhythm divorced from reality. In her depictions of stacked spaces, history and geography are collapsed. The landscapes depicted are both themselves altered by human interaction, and the ensuing paintings feel like idiosyncratic records of Condon's mind and her imaginings of the space. As one critic puts it: "the result feels like a dream or memory suddenly, if fleetingly, made visible." Viewing Condon's paintings, imbued as they are with this intense personal quality, consequently feels "a bit like reading her diary: strangely disorienting at first, then disarming and familiar."
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it into an important element of her work. She now uses vintage wallpaper patterns as a visual element in her work, and recounts asking her mother for leftover wallpaper and fabric samples to use in her studio. The plum blossom in particular is not only of central importance to
Chinese art, it also appeared on the wallpaper of her childhood bedroom.
179:, which is as much a mediation practice as it is a painting technique, where form and gesture are united in a single stroke: "the form is created from gesture. It's all about the quality of line. In western art, it's all about volume." She often depicts "the four gentlemen" of Chinese painting: bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum, and plum blossom.
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makes "for multi-layered, exuberant work." The graphic layers act as a ground for her organic, sensual figures. She employs every use of paint handling from delicate transparent washes to thick impasto. And she borrows elements from art movements from disparate times and places, from ancient China to the
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Reexamining her experience from a feminist perspective, she began drawing inspiration from suburban home decor. She reconsidered her mother's "obsessive decorating" of her childhood home, an aesthetic that had at one time been only a symbol of her family's stifling conservatism, and transformed
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comments on the essentialness of the paint pour to Condon's practice: "Pours are structural necessities in her work. They provide the primal soup from which her pictures emerge. Condon's pours are at the intersection of crossed axes, one between image and shape, the other between pattern and gesture,
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In her earliest professional work, Condon made dolls portraits- as she describes it, as a method of recreating her childhood. However, the paintings were about more than nostalgia for a time of innocence. The paintings are described as both funny and unsettling: "ambiguity and conflict are recurring
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The theme of place is crucial to her work. Condon travels frequently for artist residencies, and her globetrotting is evident in her paintings. Each new place works its way into her psyche and becomes a new layer or reference. "The idea of the pour as violent and sudden and the reconstruction out of
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This accidental, transformational, action-based method contributes to a sense energy and directness to her work: "The dynamism of Condon's all-over compositions feels self-propelled, and it's easy to imagine them stretching far beyond their borders into an endless, gyrating flow of birds, plants and
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Born in Los
Angeles, Condon was drawn to Asian culture and aesthetics filtered through home decor, Disney, and fantasy television. Through her travels and studies, Condon has become deeply influenced by ancient Chinese painting and philosophy, as well as the experience of living in modern Asian
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scene to children's picture books to news photographs from the Iraq war. Critic Edward Gomez comments: "Her interests and influences are as diverse and unpredictable as her compositions are well-balanced and complete, even inevitable." The connections among her subjects often seem tenuous, but
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Critics often comment on the difficulty of making such dissimilar elements work in a final composition: "It's a pastiche of four styles. The colors are weird. The abstract portions won't settle into their abstractness, and the figurative portions don't amount to anything recognizable. It looks like
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Condon says of her own use of flowers: "The fleeting lifespan of flowers is mirrored by our own, as well as our environment and history. Flowers are sexual, feminine, autonomous, and dismissed as minor. As such they dwell in the margins, free from scrutiny. My flowers are fissured, on the brink of
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scrolls the philosophy that a landscape painting is a portrait of an artist's inner life. She also borrows a complex sense of space and perspective, where different points of view are forged into one multi-layer and time-compressed experience. The resulting compositions have a real sense of space,
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Condon mixes both media and styles in her work. In addition to paint, she has employed Mylar sheets, metallics, glitter and rhinestones. She has command of a wide range of styles, from traditional landscape techniques to
Chinese brush painting to patterning borrowed from graphic design, which
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Condon is able to draw out unexpected similarities. "In lesser hands that might be a recipe for disaster" critic Van Siclen notes. "But Condon makes it work, deftly fusing the free-flowing, nonlinear perspective of
Chinese painting with the free-flowing, nonlinear logic of the Seuss books."
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The pours make the materiality of paint central to the finished work. As one critic puts it: the paint is a "torrent of material... a visual parallel to an unstoppable flood of water. This is what happens when paint is allowed to be just that, paint; it is thick, unwieldy and beautifully itself."
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Vivid color palettes and contrasting organic and geometric shapes characterize Condon's work. So too does a deliberate mixing of painting techniques, from careful rendering to loose gesture. Indeed, Condon seems to intentionally defy adherence to any single standard. Forms, places, and times move
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in 1990 before moving to
Brooklyn in 1992. She has taught extensively in Florida, and travelled widely for research and residencies. She curates exhibitions about topics that are relevant to her own practice, including paint pouring and contemporary reinterpretations of classical Asian painting.
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Artists, Condon reclaims her personal experience and love of beauty, asserting the importance and potential for intellectual rigor in such work. It is particularly powerful to use such imagery in large-scale, abstract work, a painting tradition that is dominated by men, expressing the feminist
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She pairs uncontrolled blobs and trails of paint with her detailed renderings of buildings, trees, and flowers. Since she does not plan out compositions beforehand, forms seems emerge organically out of the accident of the pour and materiality of paint. Says Condon, "I'm completely
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One painting can contain myriad spaces or timelines layered over one another: "Paintings hide beneath paintings in each painting. The surfaces build from stain to film to opacity. The imagery crosses from east to west coast, and east to west hemisphere, with the ease and speed of ideas."
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In discussion of her own work, she often mentions the concept of emptiness and fullness, which she learned from sumi-e painting. Whereas the western painting tradition values contrast and opposition, Condon seeks a delicate balance between fullness and emptiness in her compositions.
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Her landscapes feature references to places as far away as Taiwan, Beijing, and
Australia, as well as her native California and homes in Florida and Manhattan. She incorporates imagery from environments as diverse as the Everglades to the Grand Canyon to dense urban spaces.
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is critical to understanding Condon's practice. It is evident both in the range and unlikeliness of the source material she uses, and in her final compositions, which feel like odd remixes of painting styles that combine into something wholly new.
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With their domestic references, sumptuous colors, floral imagery, and use of pretty materials like glitter, her paintings engage with the world's disdain for a certain gender, class, and aesthetic taste. Like other
416:(2008), Girls Club Collection (2008), JP Morgan Chase Art Collection (2015 and 2017), Martha and Jim Sweeny Collection of Contemporary Prints by American Women at Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg, FL (2015),
291:, "these are also deceptively political paintings. The decorative here in Condon's painting serves as a formal device and a marker of "feminine" identity asserting itself against a culture of reactionary values."
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She is also inspired by a splashed-ink method that can be found in some painting and pottery of the Later Tang
Dynasty. She translates this ancient method into her modern take on paint pouring.
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Condon often begins a composition with pouring acrylic or oil paint, so that the kinetic quality of the material creates unexpected forms and effects. Her use of paint has been compared to
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cities. In 2004, on a residency in Taiwan, she began to practice
Chinese painting techniques, which emphasize variety in texture and inflection, as well as improvisation.
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themes... Elisabeth Condon's deceptively decorative paintings are hardly distinguishable from the children she depicts, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy."
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She has participated in over 20 residencies and fellowships in
Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai, Spain, and the UK, along with locations across the United States, notably the
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94:(born 1959) is a contemporary American painter who combines natural imagery, the built environment, and abstraction in her free-flowing synthetic landscapes.
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328:. The piece, entitled Urban Idyll, consists of thirty-six laminated glass panels that are translations of elements from her paintings. The theme is the
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and expressive of the current technological environment, where input of ideas, news, and images from around the world is fast-paced and unceasing.
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The energy in her paintings connects back to her fascination with
Chinese art and the belief that a painting must have qi, or a vital life force.
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such as flowers and birds. In Shanghai she recognized the importance of decoration to the urban landscape and classical Chinese painting.
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spontaneous. I start with pours of paint, so that painting becomes like taking a trip, with contingencies and unexpected outcomes."
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Condon's first major public commission was at the Tampa Airport in 2017. In 2018 Condon installed a permanent public work at the
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In the wake of her 2014 residency in Shanghai, Condon has been embracing imagery that is considered feminine or
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that shock echoes the concept of modern travel," Condon said. "Your whole ethos is impacted by where you are."
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emphasis on personal experience, rather than a pure vision of an overarching narrative that is the project of
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Foundation Painters & Sculptors Program Grant; and a Joan Mitchell Center Residency in 2024.
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2007 Pollock Krasner; 2008 Florida Individual Artist Fellowship; 2015 NY PULSE Prize (booth
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847:"Art review: 'Into the Wild' exhibit at MDC Kendall Campus explores forces of nature"
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Elisabeth Condon was born in Los Angeles. She completed her BFA in Painting at
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Condon draws inspiration from a wide variety of source material, from the 1970s LA
1009:"Elisabeth Condon's Shanghai-Inspired Paintings Win the 2015 New York PULSE Prize"
804:. Miami: Miami International Airport Division of Fine Arts and Cultural Affairs.
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collapse; glowing with internal light, like fire, before they curdle and die."
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offering the potential in subsequent layers to transform into any of them."
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Condon has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally since 1998.
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Condon has also run an art criticism blog, Raggedy Ann's Foot, since 2007.
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599:"In New Paintings, Elisabeth Condon Pours on Color and Unexpected Forms"
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Domestic Aesthetics in Elisabeth Condon: Effulgence (exhibition catalog)
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866:"Review Elisabeth Condon: Bird and Flower at Lesley Heller Gallery"
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402:); 2015 New York Studio School Mercedes Matter Alumni Award; 2018
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581:. Wilmington, North Carolina: Art & Antiques Worldwide Media.
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it was painted by committee. And yet the painting is working."
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for 2 years. She completed her MFA in Painting at the
912:"ART REVIEWS Defining a Century Through the Use of Color"
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Essay published for the exhibition Near and Distant Views
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In the current political climate and in the wake of the
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but they are also puzzles, impossible to make sense of.
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Elisabeth Condon's Unnatural Life (exhibition catalog)
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687:"Paintings That Shouldn't Work: Elisabeth Condon"
215:streams of luscious, electric, energized color."
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316:Urban Idyll at Astoria–Ditmars Boulevard station
151:This mix of styles and influences is distinctly
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572:"Still Abstract After All These Years"
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910:Harrison, Helen (October 14, 2001).
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605:. New York: Hyperallergic Media Inc.
776:"Elisabeth Condon Artist Interview"
190:Paint pouring and direct experience
1007:Martinez, Alanna (March 7, 2015).
660:Tschida, Anne (December 6, 2012).
627:. West Palm Beach: Bruce Helander.
570:Gomez, Edward M. (February 2013).
529:Tschida, Anne (November 9, 2012).
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649:. Miami: José E. López-Niggemann.
616:Walker-Tomé, Kara (Summer 2011).
553:"Three Painters Bare Their Souls"
322:Astoria–Ditmars Boulevard station
662:"Fairs Showcase Hometown Talent"
344:in 1986, as well as studying at
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115:Effulgence by Elisabeth Condon
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817:"The Consciousness Painter"
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980:Condon, Elisabeth (2019).
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1031:Joan Mitchell Foundation
899:. Miami: Emerson Dorsch.
795:"Near and Distant Views"
518:. Miami: Emerson Dorsch.
414:Art in Embassies Program
374:Everglades National Park
472:New Zealand Art Monthly
159:Chinese scroll painting
46:Los Angeles, California
35:Artist Elisabeth Condon
930:"Astoria Ditmars Blvd"
643:"Natural Proclivities"
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422:Perez Art Museum Miami
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277:Pattern and Decoration
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934:MTA Arts & Design
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693:. Miami: David Cohen.
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142:Color Field painting
782:. Miami: PROVK LLC.
418:Tampa Museum of Art
200:Helen Frankenthaler
1027:"Elisabeth Condon"
986:Raggedy Ann's Foot
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730:"Elisabeth Condon"
618:"Artists to Watch"
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410:Public Collections
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936:. MTA. 2018
918:. New York.
824:Pretty Lady
691:artcritical
535:Knight Arts
308:Public work
1074:Categories
1037:2024-06-18
988:. Blogspot
826:. Blogspot
734:M Magazine
717:. Atlanta.
428:References
299:Early work
251:Femininity
198: and
153:postmodern
715:ArtPapers
412:include:
129:glam rock
54:Education
853:. Miami.
736:. Miami.
711:"Review"
671:. Miami.
559:. Miami.
537:. Miami.
424:(2017).
121:pastiche
107:Pastiche
960:"About"
451:12 June
76:Website
376:; the
361:Career
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