Ann Purcell's half century of exploration reveals a quiet strength.
“MY PAINTING IS WORKING WITHIN TENSIONS OF PARADOX, AMBIGUITY, DUALITY AND CONTRADICTION. IT IS NOT ON ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER, IT IS THOSE POLARITIES UNITED. THIS IS THE TOTALITY AND THE FULLNESS. THE MEANING CANNOT BE EXPRESSED IN WORDS ALONE: IT IS A FEELING, A SENSE, AN EXPERIENCE, A JOY, AN IDEA.”
From Washington to Brooklyn, Mexico City, Provincetown and beyond, Ann Purcell has found a global pot potpourri of inspiration.
Purcell was born in 1941 in Washington, D.C. and raised in Arlington, Virginia. She studied independently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and received her B.A. from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and George Washington University, Washington, D.C., in 1973. She went on to receive her M.A. in Liberal Studies from New York University in 1995. While finishing her degree at the Corcoran, Purcell took a summer course with Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, who became her mentor and lifelong friend. Through Davis, she met Jacob Kainen, who had been Graphic Arts curator at the Smithsonian. Purcell recalls often walking through museums in Washington, D.C. with Davis and Kainen, considering the historical context of works of art and critiquing them analytically. Her development was also shaped by time spent in the artist’s colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, beginning in the summer of 1982. She first went to the Cape Cod artist’s colony on the recommendation of E. A. Carmean, Jr., then chief curator of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery. In Provincetown, Carmean introduced her to Robert Motherwell, whose work Purcell admires and from which she has drawn major inspiration. Other sources of influence for Purcell have been the cutouts of Matisse and the art of Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko.
