About
Fern Bass
Fern Bass began her study of painting
and drawing as a child at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, and continued
into her early twenties at the Art Students League. By 1978, she started
working towards a BFA in communications design at Pratt Institute. The
years 1981 through 1996 were spent nurturing a successful commercial
career in editorial and promotional art direction at Fairchild Publications,
The New York Times and Conde Nast Publications.
It wasn’t
until after her mother’s death in 1998, that Bass began painting
again after a long haitus. Pouring over family albums inspired her
to revisit characters from her family’s past in an attempt to
memorialize and emotionally chronicle her family history. After producing
an entire body of work of images her family, Bass’s new paintings
have evolved as gestural explorations of the figure packed with emotional
resonance. Working on these psychological portraits, Bass chooses her
color, often vivid and startling, for it’s emotional and expressive
qualities. Wildly expressive line gives the work an immediacy and allows
for creation of loose gesture which coupled with solid form beneath
renders her figures as “emotional portraits.”
Bass works
in a variety of media, including oil on canvas, oil stick, cold wax
medium, powdered pigment, ink and compressed charcoal on frosted mylar
and paper.
curriculum
vitae
