Bio:
Marianne Fairbank Partlow, an artist, fine art appraiser and consultant, has run several art galleries during her career. Since the closing of the Marianne Partlow Gallery in Olympia, Washington in 1992 she has turned her attention to painting and printmaking and has been recognized with prizes in regional competitions. Her woodcuts have been exhibited in national museum print competitions. From an early interest in water-based media which she developed with painters Stephen Quiller, Carol Riley, Jonelle Johnson, Gary Faigin, and Sondra Freckelton, she is currently concentrating on paintings and pastels.
She has worked as a consulting curator, and has taught art history and studio watercolor at the college level. She holds a BA in Art History from Cornell University and an MA in Art History from the University of Virginia. She spent a year studying art history in Paris at L’Ecole du Louvre. As a founding member of the City of Olympia Arts Commission, a board member of Artist Trust and other art executive boards, she has worked actively for the development of the visual arts in the Pacific Northwest. Currently she maintains a home studio in Olympia, Washington. She has exhibited locally with Childhood’s End Gallery and ArtHouse Designs Gallery and at the Bainbridge Gallery of Arts And Crafts.
Marianne received her designation as an Accredited Senior Appraiser in Fine Art in 2009 with the American Society of Appraisers. She is a fine art appraiser and consultant specializing in 19th and 20th century Northwest, American, Canadian and European Art.
Artist Statement:
I have had a rich career in a variety of aspects of the art business including gallery owner and director, professor, museum curator, and fine art appraiser.
Since I closed the Marianne Partlow Gallery in Olympia, Washington in 1994 I have explored a variety of painting media including oil, watercolor, gouache and encaustics. I have also executed woodcuts and monoprints-generally on landscape or architectural subjects.
But for the last few years I have found expression in soft pastel on coated papers. I am fundamentally a colorist with a strong interest in design and composition. Overall pattern is paramount in my work even in the simplest paintings. Having spent a lot of time living and studying art history in France I feel an affinity to modern artists who are interested in unusual and often strong coloration, in the flattening of pictorial space, and in the dominance of symbolism over realism in painting- artists such as Bonnard, Gaugin and the French Nabis along with the Englishman David Hockney and the American painters, Milton Avery and Fairfield Porter. Their works reflect the modern figure and landscape but offer a sort of symbolic distillation.
After years studying landscape, garden and figure subjects, I find myself moving in closer to them to discover the essence that drew me in originally. I would like to see them through fresh twenty-first century eyes. I am also revisiting the use of gouache- a medium which is inherently flat.