“I Love to Paint and I Love Paint”: At 85, the Abstract Artist Ann Purcell Refuses to Be Bored

Ann Purcell first wanted to paint after reading W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence. The book, which draws inspiration from the life of Paul Gauguin, details how Vincent van Gogh learned to make art by copying masterworks. On a rainy day, Purcell thought to do the same, so she dropped by her neighborhood drugstore to pick up her first painting supplies. She began by copying Pablo Picasso’s melancholic clown portrait, Pierrot (1918). “I was just immediately hooked from that moment on, and I just started painting on my own constantly,” Purcell says on a recent phone call. “That was the trigger.”

 

Purcell, now 85, is still hooked. The New York–based artist paints nearly every day, as she has done for five decades. She is known for large-scale, gestural abstract paintings featuring clashing colors and stochastic, or random, patterns. Legendary art critic Benjamin Forgey described her work as “light-filled paintings” and “a delightful, sensual explosion” in the 1970s, a pivotal decade for the artist. At the time, however, many of her paintings never reached the gallery, as she “wasn’t intending them to be shown” because she was “too busy working and trying to survive.” Some 50 years later, just blocks from her first New York studio, Purcell’s new show at Berry Campbell features paintings from 1975 and 1979. “The Seventies” is the first exhibition to revisit the period immediately after she left her hometown, Washington, D.C., to pursue painting in New York.

 

— Maxwell Rabb, Harper's Bazaar