email: epnerartist@optonline.net
phone: 845 735 5609

HILDA EPNER'S APPROACH TO PAINTING

 Just as dance is a combination of music, form, motion, and line, so her paintings strive to achieve the equivalence of dance on canvas. She creates these dances in two steps: First, with classical music as the constant background, she freely applies paint to the canvas -- a spontaneous drawing or "dance" in color that reflects her feelings at that moment. Second, she builds up the painting into an expressive entity by consciously controlling all elements (color, shape, and line). Thus, her paintings become carefully choreographed mind pictures that, unlike realistic ones, could never be seen if she did not compose them on canvas.


HILDA EPNER'S APPROACH TO DRAWING

To create these expressive and whimsical drawings, she looks only at the model and draws a continuous line without lifting her pen and without looking at the paper until the portrait is completed. Because she keeps her eyes on the model, she senses the contours more strongly and, at the same time, is less distracted by the details or "accuracy" of the drawing in progress. The results are imaginative and lyrical; never realistic or predictable. Only occasionally does a likeness to the model sneak in.

HILDA EPNER'S BACKGROUND IN ART

Hilda Epner received an M.A. in Fine Arts and Education from Columbia University and studied with Hugh Mesibov and with Sam Feinstein of the Hans Hoffman school of painting.

Though her style has changed over the years, her paintings have remained expressive arrangements of strong color and form and many have included automatic (subconscious) writing. Her paintings have been exhibited at Guild Hall at Easthampton, Nyack Hospital, Pearl River Public Library, Rockland Center for the Arts and at the following juried shows: Princeton Art Association, Studio 4 West, the Burd House Gallery, and Garnerville Industrial Arts Center. Her paintings and drawings are regularly exhibited at the Piermont Fine Arts Gallery. Five of her paintings were selected from the gallery to be shown at Manhattan Transfer in New York City, while eight of her drawings were selected to be shown at the Train Station Gallery in West Stockbridge, MA. A one-person show of her paintings and drawings was arranged at Freelance Cafe in Piermont, NY and another at the Suffern Public Library. Two of her recent drawings were selected by Dr. P. Solomon as illustrations for her new book, The Assessment Bridge.

Before devoting full-time to her artwork, she taught Art at the Ridgewood School of Art, Pearl River School District, and Shawnee Leadership Institute, and taught puppetry at the Rockland Center for the Arts. She also taught Literature, Creative Writing, and Social Studies to Pearl River students, and was faculty advisor to the high school literary/art magazine, The Tenth Muse. In addition, she lectured on abstract expressionism at the Sunday Art Seminars of St. Thomas Aquinas College and on her drawing technique at Hopper House. She is a trustee of Edward Hopper House, Nyack, NY.