Anne Sherwood Pundyk Bio
Anne Sherwood Pundyk was born in Manhattan, where she now lives and works, but spent much of her childhood moving throughout the United States. Although her family moved often, one constant was visiting her grandmother, Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, a painter, in southern Ohio. In fact, much of her artistic inspiration comes from those visits to her grandmother, whose brick American gothic house was built on a hill by a family member in 1884.
”Starting in 1913, my grandmother studied fine art for several years in New York City. She shared with me her view of painting from her work at The Art Student’s League under important American realist painters such as Robert Henri and George Bellows,” Ms. Pundyk says. Those visits were transformative, paving the way for Ms. Pundyk’s first serious explorations of painting and her own interpretation of art history's masterpieces, at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She continued her studies at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, and then completed her graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, RI.
Ms. Pundyk has recently had solo exhibitions at Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA, and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, and numerous galleries nationwide. More than 50 private collections include her work, in the United States and Europe.
Today, painting primarily in oil on linen, Ms. Pundyk continues to look to the European and American painters of the 19th Century -- Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Impressionists -- for inspiration. She combines these visual traditions and others found in popular culture with themes found in literature and mythology, and with the formative images from her own life.
Her subjects come from domains defined by home and garden, family and friends. Against these intimate settings, the mythic themes of love, jealousy, courage, betrayal, forgiveness and revenge play out, elevating daily tasks and routine encounters to something more. A chair sits incongruously within a landscape; modern portraits portray the themes of Greek mythology; varied traditions come together to create something at once familiar and new.
“In her series of richly rendered oil paintings on canvas, New York artist Anne Sherwood Pundyk presents unexpected images of a formal mahogany or walnut dining chair with padded seat - possibly a family heirloom - placed at river's edge,” Art Critic Ruth Ratter recently observed. “Water caresses one leg of the chair and threatens to submerge it. A tree's reflection forms quivering patterns on the river's surface. Sunlight gleams on the tree leaves and grass. The throne-like chair appears to await us.”