Dorothea Bilder, Acclaimed Artist

(D. Bilder)

Dorothea Bilder , a nationally acclaimed artist is known for her expertise in lithography, collages, paintings, and silk screen prints. Bilder uses many techniques and processes such as subtle color mixtures using gold, silver and copper pigments and combining both transparent and opaque inks in her silk screen and lithographic prints. She uses plant and animal forms, landscapes, roots and microscopic detail. According to Bilder, "... because plants live, grow and die, as we do, they become metaphors for human beings."

^{Ms. Bilder's acceptance into an important class of 20th century art is shown with her history of major gallery exhibits, national recognition awards, and favorable published reviews. She is the author of the book "Silk Screen Printing" and has been recognized by the international community through her art exhibitions in Canada and Brazil.}

^{Bilder loves experimenting and creating using serigraphy, stone lithography, metal lithography, and drawing.}

 ^{Dorothea Bilder: In Her Own Words}

^{Comments made for a 2004 exhibition entitled: "Sight, Sound, & Scent".}

^{…paintings were produced through the use of drawing techniques, filled with spontaneous marks, energy and layers of thin transparent pigment. Each image has a unique spatial consideration dependent upon my sense of the landscape .}

^{Each image is unique unto itself, however, each work is an interal part of an expression of the whole. I have interpreted a specific aspect of nature at a particular time in varying locations. These images can stand alone as individual expressions of specific landscapes but also function as integral parts of the total series. Nature is a series of layers. It is not flaunted, never hidden ... it is "just there." Each painting uses either some sense of tangible imagery or metaphorical imagery hovering between representation and abstraction. In the motion picture "Surviving Picasso," the actor portraying Picasso said, "I don't bake cakes."}

^{Sight, Sound, & Scent is about what I am, who I am and where I have come from. All the previous works of art I have created lead me to the term informants. An "informant" is something that acquaints, appraises and notifies. The lithographs ... along with the smaller paintings, are the informants for the larger works. For 35 years, I taught printmaking and drawing, even though my ... degrees were in painting with a minor in printmaking. ...}

^{Along the borders of some of my prints and paintings, I use calligraphic marks, symbols and brushstrokes which, for me, reference previous civilizations, map-making, alphabets and other traces of previous cultures. These reflect the collective sources of inspiration for my art. It is my way of informing viewers and directing their interest through the composition as well as bringing attention to the edge. Durer, Rembrandt, Vuillard, Bonnard, Gorky, Baziotes and my father were some of my primary artisitic informants. [Note: Dorothea's father was the noted painter Angelo Bilder, whose work is in many corporate collections.]}

^{My landscapes are not literal translations of what the eyes see. I portray landscapes not only as aerial views or as cross-sections of specific sights, but as environments that reflect philosophic physiologic, architectonic and/or organic changes. My senses are heightened by the weather, changing seasons, reading, relationships, concepts, people in my life, events and travels. Human beings walk through life thinking that we have the ability to control or change our landscape and/or the environment we live in. But it is the Earth and nature that control how we function as human beings. I deeply believe this truth and have tried to produce a universal sense of the landscape. This is my interpretation of the change in seasons using my mind's eye and my physical eye.}

^{Pierre Bonnard, the noted Fauvist, said, "One's eyes view one's head." My art challenges the viewer and may not be easily visually understood or accepted but its narrative is universal. My art is about the landscape, the Earth, and the energies of the Earth.  Dorothea Bilder}

 
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