Deborah Held has produced a large body of work over four decades in her studios in New York, Florida and currently in Southport, CT. Multiple collectors of her art have purchased paintings and sculptures for their collections.
Painting:
The work is exceptionally expressive and powerful: we perceive joyful seasons, the constructive and destructive energy in nature, musical textures and rhythms, fractal patterns repeating throughout the universe. They are boldly rendered in oil, acrylic and encaustic paints; explosions of color and movement, most of them large in scale. The brushwork is loose and vigorous. Color choices remind us of Matisse, Gaugin and Hoffman; color placements move the eye a la Mondrian, compositions are as sure and cohesive as Kandinsky and Picasso, but they are all unquestionably, uniquely Deborah Held.
The encaustic painting are smaller in scale, though equally wide in variety and creativity as her oil and acrylics. Her encaustic application includes layering and remelting; the under layers bursting through the upper layers when fused with intense heat. Scraping, adding foil, paper or oil paint, scratching or carving into the paint enrich the surfaces.
Sculpture
Held’s sculptures exaggerate and reinvent “reality”. Abstract and representational compositions in clay, bronze, stone, ceramic or mixed media, all have a dynamic equilibrium. Even in stone or bronze the subjects are in a lively dance captured at the moment when centeredness and off centeredness are both in play. She finds the dance in a solid object.
The kinetic sculptures are abstract mobiles. She assembles hand fashioned shapes on wire strategically balanced so that as the moving parts change their relationships to each other the sculpture continues to have coherence as well as variety. The changing relationship of parts is enhanced by the changing shadows they cast. The mobiles manifest the air currents. Also, the air currents manifest the mobiles.
Artist’s Comment
“It is exciting to perceive how music looks, how gesture conveys emotion, the texture of dreams… Keeping open to this beneficial synesthesia is my artistic attitude. I look to channel some of the energy and beauty of the world, cosmic and microcosmic.” 8/24/2023
StateCT
