Marjorie grew up in Westport, Connecticut. As a child she would lie in bed and scribble with crayons on the wall over her head. She was always doodling, and probably inherited her artistic desire from her uncle; artist, cartoonist animator and filmmaker, Sam Weiss. She attended Staples High School and her teacher, Jim Wheeler, was a great influence and continues to be a voice in her head to this day. His classes focused on drawing from life, and she recalls those sessions fondly with classical music playing during the long poses of the model. Students in the class would take turns being the model, and Marjorie still has drawings from back then.
After graduating she attended the Hartford Art School (HAS) where she was introduced to conceptual art under the instruction of her foundation program professors, Jan Groover Boice, Christopher Horton and Solomon Cicero. Her interest shifted from representational art to examining how the ideas behind and the processes in making works of art were the objective, rather than the visual outcome of the work.
After two years at HAS she transferred to Tyler School of Art where she spent her junior year in Rome. Living in Italy and studying Italian Renaissance Art was an exceptional time in her life. She studied with the renown, abstract artist, Stephen Greene, who had basically dismissed her as an artist, as she was having difficulty finding her focus. But, one day shortly after the start of second semester he was walking by her studio and quickly did an about face, saying he loved the painting she was working on. It was an abstract landscape that had caught his eye which she then began a series of and has never looked back. Her time at Tyler ended after a year in Philadelphia, where she studied with Stanley Whitney and Margo Margolis, and developed another series of experimentation with blocks of color, also a style she goes back to on occasion.
After college, Marjorie moved to Guilford, CT where she met her husband, architect Tom McCabe, and raised two daughters. She had a successful 30-year career in graphic design, working for several firms full time before opening her own award-winning company, Sopkin Design. Once her daughters finished college, Marjorie closed her company and returned to painting full-time. She presently enjoys working in a beautiful studio space in downtown Guilford. Her work is in private and corporate collections throughout New England, New York, the West Coast, Great Britain and India.
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