DON VOISINE

“In 2009 I began the twenty-four-part painting that became The Clock. It started off with the idea of a small group of images with related forms, five or six initially, which grew to ten, then eighteen, then eventually twenty-four. Each painting was a study of the diamond shape in the middle and [I] thought the format might work as a series or a multi-part painting. Working on a few individual pieces at a time without seeing them as part of the larger whole didn’t lead me anywhere since I couldn’t see them together in my small studio and it became frustrating enough that I set the panels aside for some ten years. After getting accepted into the Sharpe Walentas Studio residency in 2019, I was provided the opportunity to take the project on again and see if I could resolve the painting after all this time. The final result is very different from how it would have looked ten years ago. My palette is brighter, there are more areas of modulated and differentiated paint handling that I was not ‘allowing’ previously. My paintings are made in a very straightforward manner, no tricks, no flourishes and no fancy mediums. They are made by simply overlaying or abutting planes or bands, generally combining no more than four or five elements. My paintings are obviously hand-painted and gain some visual buzz from their imperfections.”

•  Don Voisine

Don Voisine attended the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Deer Isle, Maine and the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2019, he was a recipient of The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and an Artist Fellow in Painting finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2018. In 2011, Voisine was awarded the Purchase Prize at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME and the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY. His work is in numerous permanent collections including: Art in Embassies Program, United States Department of State, Washington, DC; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT; New York Public Library, NY; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Neuberger Berman, New York, NY; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the Joel and Lila Harnett Print Study Center, University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, VA, among others.