ROWENA ABDY

 

Post 184 -Gautam Shah 

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

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Rowena Fischer Meeks Abdy (1887-1945) was an American modernist painter of landscapes. She was born in Vienna, Austria to American parents, who encouraged her to pursue art to compensate for her deformed leg.

The family, after prolonged stays in Vienna, Dresden, Paris and London, in 1890s moved to San Francisco, California. Here, she worked on plein air painting of the coastal towns, Spanish missions, and the scenery of San Francisco, mainly in water colours.

Abdy was a realist, who painted ‘what she feels about what she sees’. Her fascination for the ‘history of California and early Spanish heritage motivated her drawings and paintings’.

Abdy favoured charcoal, water colour, and oil for art. From early 1930s, She stopped using white paint in her water colours. She believed, ‘abstract art should be used ... for home through decorative arts, but her later art pieces show substantial abstraction of forms.

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