DAWN SPENCER HURWITZ

ARTIST BIO

My work speaks of the inner life; of the unseen and the life of the spirit.

I was trained in classical artistic method at Boston University College of Fine Arts, and so my work reflects a knowledge of formal technique while exploring and pushing the range of abstract expressionism into the multi-sensory. Utilizing multimedia in 2D work (acrylic paint /acrylic medium/ metal leaf/raw pigment) and aroma as a simultaneous 3D ‘scent sculpture’, I hope to compel the viewer to experience the work in new, deeply felt ways. The visual art work combined with aromatic translations express the emotional impact of pure color and the unseen experience we all carry within us; sometimes untouched.

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My work has been included in group painting and photography shows in Boston, MA and Boulder, CO since 1992 and I've been showing ‘multi- sensory expression’ work since 2009.

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I'm one of the pioneers of the American Independent / Artisan Perfume movement and have been designing aromas for nearly 30 years. Since my first multidisciplinary art project, passionflower perfume poems (a poetry / visual art / fragrance project, 1999-2001) I have continued to explore the conceptual dimensions of fragrance design including the "Perfume in a Poem" project (whereby by the Ezra Pound poem, "In a Station of the Metro" is translated into a perfume) as well as my own aroma color collection, "CHROMA"; translations of color into scent, which was a finalist for the Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award in 2015.

I've created multi-sensory art presentations and installations for Denver Art Museum, BMoCA, the Dairy Center for the Arts, and Naropa University, as well as other galleries and institutions.

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My work is about a purity of color that visually translates emotion and experience. The movement / brushwork expresses the transience of life and eternal change. I reference the magical, otherworldly feel of metal leaf that reflects the tradition of spiritual artwork of the past; as gold leaf has been utilized in religious work of the byzantine / renaissance periods in judeo-christian traditions as well as in traditional Japanese screen painting. I started my visual work within the traditions of oil painting and egg tempera / gilding but as I have evolved, I have transitioned to mixed media, working subject matter from life drawing and the external world to ‘essence’ and the internal world of spirit. It is a kind of distillation; a questioning of ‘how do we find pure essence? How do we feel our experience?’ This new work speaks to what our senses tell us.

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My visual influences are Hans Hofmann, Selina Treiff, J.M.W. Turner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, George Tooker, Morris Graves, Robert Kushner, Fra Angelico, Piero della Franceso, Kandinsky, Chagall, Paul Resika, Michael Mazur, and Stuart Baron.