ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

“During my recent Residency in Wyoming, I was filled with a profound sense of the rhythm and movement within the vast expanses of land and sky. The reflective silence awakened in me both a deeper connection with and a more playful approach to my imagery.”

Born in Albany, New York, Marilyn Propp developed an enduring love for the lush green expanses of upstate New York and the Adirondack Mountains. For over thirty years her work has moved between the figure, abstraction, and the landscape.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, the Brooklyn Museum Art School on a Max Beckmann Memorial Scholarship, and the Provincetown Workshop. Her early work reflected her interest in simplified primal forms reminiscent of Stonehenge, as she searched for a mythic language. Leaving the east coast, she attended the pre-MFA program at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she discovered Bay Area light and figurative painters, in particular the large Diego Rivera murals at the school. In 1973 she and David Jones (Director, Anchor Graphics) met in San Francisco and drove to Louisville, Kentucky in their Volkswagen bus to attend the Center for Photographic Studies. The world of fine art photography, works of figures blurred and moving through space, became a strong influence. In 1976 she and David traveled to Kansas City, where her design was chosen to be placed on a prominent downtown 55 by 115 foot exterior wall. For eleven years Marilyn created outdoor works from direct observation, and studio work of stained color and gestural marks, studying the light, color, and space of the Midwestern landscape.

Marilyn completed her MA at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her graduate thesis “Stations of the Cross: Fourteen Paintings on Paper” merged the abstracted landscape with the figure. These large pieces are permanently installed at Old St. Patrick’s Church, Chicago. In 1987 she and David moved to Chicago, where her work continues to reference both the figure and the landscape. In recent work the figures have become animated industrial forms.  As described by Margaret Hawkins: “Marilyn Propp’s richly colored paintings on shaped wood panels combine abstraction with realistically rendered objects that appear to spin, twist and float through deep space like little tornadoes made of paint or tempests in surreal teapots.”

She is on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago, Loyola University, and the Evanston Art Center. Propp is a co-founder of Anchor Graphics, now Anchor Graphics @ Columbia College. Her work has been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and in Saudi Arabia.