ARTIST STUDIO BY SUNAMITA LIM | PHOTO BY DOUGLAS KENT HALL
In her pursuit of beauty, minimalist artist Florence Pierce utilizes creative vision and light to achieve balance and elegance in her intriguing resin reliefs, while inviting perfection into her Zen-like, modernist artistry.
Seems serendipity slipped into her life when a drop of resin accidentally spilled onto tinfoil—and opened up new ways for this artist to look at light. Pierce began seeing her art—colorful monochromatic abstractions and varying textures within flat-surfaced works—as being beyond the ordinary.
The last living member of Taos TPG (Transcendental Painting Group), Pierce credits Emil Bisttram, her TPG mentor, with inspiring her artistic growth. Moving to Taos at 18 to be his student, Pierce laughingly recalls how her mother had no idea that her daughter’s nubile “attraction for the men in town would turn out to be quite hazardous.”
Can the transcendental truths Taos bestows upon receptive artists be sacred tools for creating illumining art? Pierce has certainly mastered her art from within, and in so doing, transports us into that wordless realm to better appreciate uncommon beauty that can only be felt, and not described.
Celebrating her 86th birthday last July, Pierce smiles at the memory of her gallerist-friend Charlotte Jackson, “surprising me as she does every year, with a cake.” Pierce has lived in Albuquerque for 55 years.
From the Winter/Spring 2005 issue
