Helaine Soller
Helaine Soller · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Acrylic Paint, Paper, Watercolor
- Practice
- Drawing, Painting, Works on Paper
Helaine Soller’s career path was set at ten years of age when she first studied oil painting. Soller received degrees from Pratt Institute BFA and Queens College MS. She studied with Jacob Lawrence at the New School, i… Full biography
Biography
Helaine Soller’s career path was set at ten years of age when she first studied oil painting. Soller received degrees from Pratt Institute BFA and Queens College MS. She studied with Jacob Lawrence at the New School, in masterclasses with Jerome Witkin and Eric Fischl, and at the Art Students League.
Born and raised in New York in a neighborhood surrounded by trees and parks, attending numerous art residencies in Upstate New York, and her travels to National Parks have informed her work. Soller’s expressive intimate views of nature engage the viewer revealing the beauty and drama of often-overlooked events in the natural world, captured at a moment in time. Soller’s art evokes metaphors for cycles of life and multicultural connections to nature and alarms us to greenhouse effects. Her style combines expressionism with realism and abstraction. Spontaneous brushstrokes of color fuse observation with imagination.
Museum exhibits of her work include: MOMA PS 1, The Long Island Museum Stony Brook, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Arkell Museum, Museum of Anthropology of the People of New York
Her work is in the collections of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, National Museum of Women in the Arts Archives, the first permanent collection of Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, Segal, McCambridge, Singer Mahoney, Ltd., Spectrum Financial Consultants, and TDR Technologies Inc.
Soller’s work appeared in 24 solo exhibitions and in over 200 exhibits nationally and internationally in Tokyo Japan and Ulaanbaatar Mongolia.
Awards Soller received in painting are the Bayside Historical Society and La Galleria.
In 2008 Soller received the Individual Artist Initiative Award from Queens Council on the Arts funded by the NEA and JP Morgan Chase Foundation. Sarah Suzuki the Museum of Modern Art Curator of Drawings and Prints selected her work for the 2020 Works on Paper National exhibition in 2019 the Eric Aho selected her work in the Blue Mountain Gallery Summer Juried Exhibition.
Solo exhibits include: Citigroup Center Manhattan an NYC landmark, T 49 Gallery, Joseph Addabbo Federal Building, Berkeley College Manhattan, Mayors Office Saratoga Springs NY, Richart, UniBank, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
Galleries include Rainforest Art Foundation, Arc San Francisco, Alfa Gallery, NJ, 310 Art NC, LBIF Blai Gallery NJ, Torpedo Factory Art Center VA, The Conference Board, TelTec, Nabisco Brands, Johnson and Johnson, Artemisia Gallery ILL, RVS Fine Art, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, Lana Santorelli Gallery NJ, Pratt Institute, Queens College Art Center, University of Bridgeport, Ct, Pace University, Steinhardt Gallery Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Exit Art, The Factory LIC Arts OPEN Gallery, Case Gallery, UniBank Gallery, Richart, Ceres Gallery, Fieldstone Fine Art NJ.
Art Residencies: 2018 Weir Farm National Park Historic site, and 9 at Skidmore College Summer Six Saratoga Springs.
Soller appeared in television interviews on Queens Live Cable TV (GregSullivan QTV25 and Neil Savage juror interviews Helaine Soller award winner and on channel 25.3, interviewed by Ronnie Eldridge of Eldridge&Co. Her paintings premiered at the UN-CSW Conference of the CSWNGO/NY in the video Women Artists Express Their Concerns.
Her life-long career in painting simultaneously paralleled becoming an award-winning Art Director at the American Institute of Physics, art educator, curator, art activist.
Soller is the Executive Coordinator of the Women In the Arts Foundation.
Artist statement
I explore the beauty of nature at a moment in time to connect nature to the viewer's everyday world.
Nature challenges me to invent a personal language using lyrical and spontaneous brush strokes to capture its rhythms and forms. I choreograph and loosely plot the composition’s flow as reactions to my subject matter become one with the developing multilayered dynamics of the composition, infusing the paintings with the spirit and vitality of the moment.
Everyday events in the natural world, reveal metaphors for cycles of life and multicultural connections to nature and alarm us to greenhouse effects. My style combines expressionism, realism, and abstraction.
