Born in Chicago, painter Judy Dolnick has been creating colorful and vivid abstract paintings since the 1950s. She received her BA from Stanford University in 1955 and attended The Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, in 1957. Along with her husband, the painter Robert Natkin, and fellow artists Gerald van de Wiele and Ann Mattingly, Dolnick opened the Wells Street Gallery in Chicago to address the lack of exhibition opportunities for abstract expressionists in the area. Among the many artists successfully shown at Wells Street Gallery were the photographer Aaron Siskind and the sculptor John Chamberlain.

In 1959, Dolnick and Natkin moved to New York City. In the late 1960s, she exhibited at the Poindexter Gallery, followed by exhibitions at Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, Outlet Gallery, and the Edward Hopper House Museum. Dolnick’s work is part of many permanent collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, and The Palmer Museum of Art.

Dolnick’s art is influenced by various movements ranging from expressionism to abstraction. Her paintings pay homage to other masters, such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Redon, Kandinsky and Guston. Dolnick’s works have energy and depth; they are odes to nature and space, expressed through light (color) and brought home by the rhythm of her brushwork. Rhythm and gesture play a critical role in her artistic process, which she has continued to develop for several decades. Her aesthetic accomplishments include a vision in which her forms are solid and significant yet detached from the weight of gravity.

Entering her ninth decade of life, Dolnick continues to paint almost daily in her Connecticut and New York studios, creating works in a light and flower-filled room. Findlay Galleries is honored to represent the artist exclusively, presenting works in varying media, from acrylic on canvas to watercolor on paper, highlighting the depth and richness of Dolnick’s oeuvre.

“I love the great art of the past and present. Painting has always been a most significant part of my life. I want my work to have an unabashed sensual beauty as well as a rigorous plastic order. I hope my work conveys a MAGIC—that which makes art alive—beyond its immediate attractiveness.”

Biography

Belynda Henry is among a select group of Australian landscape painters to achieve international success. Her previous U.S. show in New York City was a sellout, and style arbiter and collector Christian Louboutin acquired more than half of the works. “Magnificent landscapes and the reflections on the water are oh so vibrant—sublime colors,” Louboutin related.

Henry first entered the ranks of leading and celebrated landscape painters in this country in 2000 after being a noted finalist in the Wynne Prize. Edmund Capon, the then-director of the Art Gallery of NSW, pointed out her work to Stuart Purves, director of the prestigious Australian Galleries. Purves noted that she brought “simplicity in her work… within a complicated world” and quickly pulled her into his artist stable. She is now a multiple finalist of both the Wynne and Archibald prizes, amongst other prestigious awards, and her work has been exhibited alongside some of Australia’s most prominent and influential Australian artists, including Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Jeffrey Smart, Lloyd Rees, Brett Whiteley, John Kelly, William Robinson, Garry Shead, John Wolseley, Inge King, George Baldessin, and John Coburn. She has held more than 30 solo shows over a prolific career. Henry lives and works deep within a long, lush valley along the wild escarpments north of Sydney. She is embedded in the landscape and exposed to its ways, witnessing the transitions of everchanging light, texture and soundscape. All of this she absorbs into her compositions of nature and the infinite fascination of the land. Henry’s works bring forth the internal meditative quality evoked by landscape, illuminating these impressions in wondrous, imaginative works. Her work has been regularly featured in media coverage, including Vogue magazine, and she was considered one of the “seven artists you should invest in now” by The Age.

Henry’s work has been acquired by private collections in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, New Zealand, Ireland, Hong Kong, Athens, Paris and London. Her work appeared in the acclaimed Thames & Hudson tome on Australian art, A Painted Landscape. Amongst those who have praised Henry’s work is fashion icon Akira Isogawa, with the designer describing her painting as “a pure form of the metaphysical landscape which almost crossed over Japanese calligraphy.” Henry’s work “somehow triggered my childhood memory of gardens in Kyoto,” Isogawa wrote. Henry’s previous New York gallerist, Tim Olsen, said, “Her sell-out exhibition in New York with us was a testament to her talent.” Quoted in a newspaper report on Henry’s international rise, Olsen said her work “seduces the eye.” “People who had never seen Australia felt enamored by the ethereal qualities of her work,” he said. “International collectors felt an intimacy and visual experience that extended beyond any axioms of a provincial experience. Her work is universal. Belynda Henry is a rare artist. Her interaction with landscape has a profound aesthetic and construct. She marries her incredible sensibility for the colors of her surrounding bushland with an underlying abstract structure,” Olsen said. In her work, Henry references the deep structure, shifting shapes and pure colors of the landscape through a meditative state rather than a literal one.

After experiencing the landscape during daylight, she returns to her studio with sketches, notes and a mind-space of imagery, allowing the works to form by night. For this series, Henry sequestered herself for an intense period to bring together her rich body of fieldwork. She says of this process that she must let the works “imagine themselves, like a dream sequence,” taking us to the precipice of total abstraction, yet masterfully holding the viewer with spare pieces of evidence caught within the work, keeping a footing in traditional genre and rendering her painting hypnotically relatable.