All-women show at Vita for Women's History Month

“AKIN,” Ann Thornycroft and Ariel Dill

English-born, Southern California-based artist Ann Thornycroft is known for her large-scale grid paintings of patterned arcs that showcase the beauty of the order of geometric shapes as well as revel in fluidity and movement. Educated at the British art schools Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, Thornycroft moved to New York City in 1969 before moving to Venice, California in 1972.  At the core of Thornycroft’s aesthetic is form, color and movement. The contrasting rigidity of the grid and the fluidity of the arcs is enhanced by sweeping washes of transparent paint that inspires meditation while bringing liveliness to any space. Thornycroft’s work has been exhibited across the country and can be found in select public collections such as Cedars Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles, CA), Hallmark Corporate Offices (Kansas City, MO), Wells Fargo Corporate Offices (San Francisco, CA), and HBO Corporate Offices (New York, NY).

Ariel Dill was born in Los Angeles California and received her MFA from Hunter College, New York, 2006. Her works are included in numerous collections including the Alex Katz Foundation Collection. In her lush, abstract paintings, Ariel Dill explores color, pattern, and the power of the brushstroke, in its endless variations, to animate the still plane of the canvas with a sense of depth and movement. Dill revels in her medium, demonstrating, with each new work, the rich and surprising potential of paint.

Also on exhibit are works by Deborah Faye Lawrence.

Born, raised and educated in Los Angeles, Deborah Faye Lawrence is a longtime artist and arts educator. She moved her practice away from tightly controlled watercolor paintings to the more expressive, less structured medium of collage as a student in the mid-1970s. Since then, her frustration with the status quo, defiance of authority, rebellion against political conservatism, and impatience with the art establishment have been asserted in her work in one way or another.

Lawrence’s collages have been widely exhibited and published and she has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2015 Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Art. She has lived with her husband in Seattle since 1993.

Deborah Faye Lawrence’s satirical mixed-media artworks have been published, exhibited and collected internationally. She has received funding and awards from The Creative Capital Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Council, WESTAF NEA, and Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, and 4Culture, among others. Her full-colour, hardcover artist’s monograph, Dee Dee Does Utopia, was published in 2008 by Marquand Books, Inc. Deborah is former art faculty at Seattle University and Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She conducts collage workshops in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland and other settings. A native of California, Lawrence earned a MFA degree from Claremont Graduate University, and has lived with her husband in Seattle since 1993. In 2017, she was awarded Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Honorable Mention Award, and in 2015 she was granted the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Creative Excellence in Visual Art from Artist Trust.

WOMEN SUPPORTING WOMEN: Thank you to our exhibit sponsors for their generous support: Sue Pollack, Martha Picciotti, Danielle Sakomoto, Melissa Kirkegaard, Sabine Dodane, Jennifer Wolf, Yolanda Alvarez, and Nahed Stefany. A special thank you to artist Robin Mitchell for introducing us to all three artists on exhibit.