Rita Deanin Abbey
American artist and educator (1930-2021)
Rita Deanin Abbey (20 July 1930 – 20 March 2021) was an abstract artist and an emeritus professor of art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She worked in a variety of mediums, published six books, and created sculptures, stained glass windows, and murals on public display around Las Vegas.
Quotes
edit- My energies have always gone into making art rather than promoting it.
- As quoted in "A Towering Spirit" for Nevada Public Radio (2022)
Rivertrip (1977)
edit- Arches National Monument is a place where I once lived,
painting out of doors with a spectacular view of
Mountain La Sal and the Arches.
There were always furrows, storms, snakes, dinosaur bones,
pot shards, new arches, rocks, the sun,
pictorially real and other real adventures.
I ventured over the old and new roads, trails,
sensing and knowing new idioms and aims,
exhilarated by my prospective Rivertrip-
My intentions, not yet disclosed...
In Praise of Bristlecone Pines (2000)
edit
- The trunks and limbs heavy with resin look polished,
Smooth to a caressing touch or embrace,
Stimulating feelings into the nature of things,
Triggering thoughts of surface textures, of color-light, form and tension.
Bristlecone Pines don’t decay...they erode like stone.
Astonishing! Yellows, greys.
Their scattered fragments, eternal spirit shapes, seem planted,
Alive and whole with shadows and scents of pine. - We need to cherish, to listen to the wisdom of the “Ancients,”
As they listen to us.
Bristlecone Pines don’t decay...they erode like stone.
Quotes about Abbey
edit- "Dance Eternal" demonstrates Abbey's excellence as a draftsman. Her line, always bold and rhythmic, is bursting with supple eloquence.
- Dan Skea, "Magic of the Desert" for The Las Vegas Sun (May 4, 1986)
- Rita Deanin Abbey translates the wild gestures of action painting into compositions on large steel panels enameled with shiny porcelain. This technique solidifies the strokes and blobs of paint into parodies of themselves, much as Roy Lichtenstein's cartoony "Brushstroke" paintings took the rough edges off Abstract Expressionism.
- Review in The New York Times (1989)
- Land is not simply a subject for Abbey, but a major fact of her life that she examines daily.
- William L. Fox, "Rita Deanin Abbey: Art in the Place of Abstraction". Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (1999), pp. 29–48
