ARTIST STATEMENT
After receiving my BFA in painting, I spent twenty-seven years
engaged in other creative pursuits. September 11, 2001 was a turning
point, moving me to pick up my brushes again. The result was “The
Bluest Day,” a collection of paintings inspired by the images that
had haunted me since that day, presented at the Foundry Gallery on
the five-year anniversary of 9/11.
Since finishing “The Bluest Day,” I have been painting abstractly,
working from my drawings. I love gesture drawing; attacking the paper with
charcoal, drawing and smudging as I go. The figure eventually emerges, as
does a record of the energy and spontaneity involved in the process. By then
cutting up my drawings and re-assembling them into abstract collages, which
often become the starting point for paintings, I combine grid-like
composition with the energy and rhythm of my gesture drawings.
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BIO
Deborah Addison Coburn is a painter and collage artist in the
Washington, DC area. She received a BFA in painting from Cornell
University, where she studied with Gillian Pederson-Krag and May
Stevens. After post-graduate study in painting, graphic design and
illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she worked as an
advertising art director at Doner Advertising and Smith Burke & Azzam in
Baltimore, MD, and at Tracy-Locke/BBDO in Dallas, TX. Returning to
painting, Ms. Coburn studied at the Corcoran School of Art with William
Christenberry and Steven Cushner. Her work has been exhibited in solo
and group shows at the Foundry Gallery and MOCA DC in Washington, DC,
and featured in juried solo shows at The Art League Gallery at the
Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA and the Montpelier Art Center in
Laurel, MD. Ms. Coburn’s work was featured in the prestigious juried
show, Strictly Painting 7 at the McLean Center for the Arts, and she is
a finalist in the Bethesda Painting Awards 2010. Her collection of
paintings commemorating 9/11, called The Bluest Day, is found in the art
registry of the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, NY.
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