Now living in Maine....and painting away. My younger years were primarily occupied as a contemporary gallery owner (Cutler/Stavaridis Gallery) first in Boston's Fort Point Channel area and then in SoHo (Bess Cutler Gallery) opening in 1983 and closing in the mid-1990s to pursue my own artwork.
I have an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts in 1976 and undergrad studies from Bard College and Brandeis University resulting in a BFA in 1971.
Artist’s Bio: Bess Cutler
By Christopher Volpe
Bess Cutler’s work combines a masterful, dynamic formalism with lush, expressive mark-making to probe Western tropes of figurative art and raw psycho-emotional states fraught with tension and strain. Even at its most explicitly figurative, her work’s complex spatial dynamics, push-pull of forces, shifting, abstracted shapes, translucent underlayers of high-contrast, gestural paint, charcoal, and ghostly abstract lines lift her work away from mere political or sentimental narrative and into the realm of visual poetry. A veteran of New York City’s downtown art scene of the 1980s and ‘90s, Cutler has returned to her New England roots (she’s an MFA graduate of the Museum School) to refocus her energies on the core principles that have driven her most personal creative work.
Artist’s Statement
Conflict between vulnerability and aggression drives my work. Scarred by its own history, the painting’s surface carries the wounds of subliminal seduction, psychological exhumation and personal exposure. Starting with photographs of the model enlarged and printed by a blueprint engineering press, I aim to construct a loose, visually dynamic complex of raw energy and form that downplays illusion in favor of physicality and the realness of the materials as they are.
While concerned with issues of compositional structure and the push-pull of forces and shifting shapes, I’m equally interested in unfiltered psychological conditions. Translucent underlayers of paint and charcoal reveal the underlying struggle, activating and contradicting the superimposed images, their history enriching and informing the present while commenting on the passage of time and the nature of art making.
I want to make these shifts obvious to the viewer as I celebrate the aggressive playfulness of the drawn line and the richness of material and color. I seek the perhaps impossible balance of intuitive mark-making and seemingly incompatible forces of formal control and constraint as a mirror of shared exposure and flawed human beauty.