Nell Blaine

by Martica Sawin

Nell Blaine was an important member of the second generation of the New York School, her work representing a dialogue between abstract principles and her sensory responses to the visible world. Her oils and watercolors of gardens, landscapes, and flower-filled still lifes display her commitment to the pleasure principle, her delight in vision, combined with a gift for improvisation and rhythm learned from the jazz greats of the 1940s. This joyous volume, illustrating more than fifty years of work, also recounts - often in Blaine's own words - the artist's life history, from her excitement when a pair of eyeglasses suddenly allowed her to see the world around her at the age of two; to the thrill of her escape to New York at the age of nineteen; to the inspiring story of Blaine's heroic victory over the polio that almost killed her in 1959. It is also invaluable as a history of the postwar community of artists, writers, and musicians with whom Blaine lived, worked, and traveled.