Joan Carol Warnow-Blewett

Place: El Segundo

Born: 1958

Biography:

Joan Nelson is a visual artist who lives and works in upstate New York. She was born in 1958 in El Segundo, California and spent her youth in St. Louis, Missouri. Nelson emerged from the East Village in the mid-‘80s at the forefront of a landscape revival that blurred the line between romance and irony. She is well known for her small paintings on thick pieces of wood using a variety of materials such as oil paint and glitter, often combined with wax. Nelson incorporates multiple pictorial landscape traditions in her vistas, combining fragments of paintings by other artists including those of artists: Hergé (Georges Remi), Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Caleb Bingham. This 'referential vocabulary' demonstrates that Nelson's 'landscape painting is not about the imitation of nature, or verisimilitude, but about art.' Occupying a unique place in the long history of landscape painting, Nelson's work speaks to the experience of nature and the complexity of its representation across time and place, one that is distinctly female and revisionist. Her work has been described as 'apocalyptic, with critics uncertain whether she is showing us an end or a potential beginning.' Nelson has showed her work regularly at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City, and she is currently represented by Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been reviewed by Art in America, Artforum, Arts Review, New/Arts Examiner, The New Yorker, Visual Arts Journal, ARTnews, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. Her work is also included in Phaidon Press' Contemporary Women Artists (1988) and Abrams' On Modern American Art (1999).