Biography:

Abby DuBow received her BA from Bennington College and her MA from the Bank Street School of Education. She has been a working artist her entire life and an art educator who taught at the Lenox, Fieldston, Brooklyn Friends, and Columbia Grammar and Prep Schools for over 30 years. She has continued to pursue her own art education at such diverse venues as Atelier 17 in Paris, the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum, Parsons School of Design, Great River Arts Institute and the Contemporary Art Center. She has studied painting, drawing, and printmaking with a variety of instructors including Stanley William Hayter, Paul Feeley, Tony Smith, Edith Katz, Rueben Tam, Seong Moy, Joe Stapleton, John Hultberg, Janis Loeb, Catherine Farish, and Sarah Amos. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the country and is in many private collections. She has received many awards for creativity and excellence.

Artist’s Statement:

As an artist I deal with relationships.  Relationships that I have to the world, community, environment, family, and friends.  I also deal with the relationship I have with myself at any given time.  My art, whether I’m painting, drawing, printing, or sculpting reflects these relationships.  I use my environment and my observations in my work.  It is therefore, inevitably, autobiographic.

I feel that my art is about life and its contradictions.   I look for objects that talk to me and either use them as is, or transform them in my work.  For me art is not an end but a constant beginning, a path that continues to lead to new places with doors that have to be opened.  It is a process that creates joy, that demands hard work, and can be filled with both frustration as well as satisfaction.

I enjoy working with a wide variety of two and three-dimensional materials, which include oils, acrylics, pastels, inks, encaustics and a wide variety of, found objects.  I am currently very focused on the spontaneity and variety that monoprinting affords.  It allows me to draw, collage, and build up layers in the creation of one of a kind prints.

Monoprinting is a very satisfying media for me in part because of the immediacy of creating an image.  I usually work with oil based inks employing a variety of plates including Plexiglas, zinc, copper, tin, prepared fiberboard and other found materials.  The initial image may be painted, scratched, collaged, embossed, drawn and then printed.  I work on building up on the initial image with further printed impressions.  Thus, the printing paper is run through the press repeatedly until I am satisfied with the image.  While the prints are one of a kind works, the process often has the feel of building a three dimensional construction.

Art has its own voice and often takes me in unexpected directions.  I like exploring the possibilities of accidents.  It’s challenging and exciting to engage and work with the unexpected.  Making art is a necessity for me.  It aids me in sorting out and distilling the world around me.  I do not replicate what I see, but rather reflect what I see and feel.  For me, creating art is an emotional process.  I cannot separate my feelings from my work.  Yet I am always struggling to distill these feelings and find universal and concise ways of visualizing emotions.