The CERF 2021 organizing committee selected Alice McEnerney Cook as the Conference Artist. For over forty years Alice’s main focus has been pleine-aire painting of the coastal wetlands of United States from Maine to Florida and west to the California coast. Alice explains that the series of paintings for CERF 2021, entitled Changing Coastal Landscapes, focuses on the fragile ribbon of green that hugs both the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific Coasts; the ribbon of green marsh nestled just behind the protection of the barrier islands and within the tidal estuaries. In some places just a pocket marsh remains while in others the ribbon is miles wide. This landscape, the tidal wetlands, is where, the scientist and writer, Rachel Carson described “the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude, where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they were since the appearance of what we know as life.” The coastal marshes are truly nature’s nursery, the birthplace for innumerable species including our own.
Alice has prepared an exhibit of nearly 60 paintings for the CERF 2021 Virtual Conference. A variety of different sized oil paintings from five of the regional affiliates will be offered offered for sale during the conference.
|
Painting at Red Bank VA
2002
|
|
Many of the earlier paintings included in the exhibit were created under the sponsorship of the Geraldine R. Dodge Artist/Educator Initiative Award, and during Artist in Residencies at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center UVA and the Art Science Initiative Project of the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge.
Alice’s marsh paintings are part of several public and private collections including the University of Virginia, The Nature Conservancy, The McGraw-Hill Company Collection, the New Jersey Museum of Boating, The Lincoln Investment Group, Joseph P. Shein Esq., and the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. Alice has shown paintings in over 100 group exhibits at the MT Burton Gallery, the New Jersey State Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Noyes Museum, Woodmere Museum, The Masur Museum of Art, Long Beach Island Foundation for Arts and Science, The Gallery of American Crafts, Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Farnsworth Art Museum, and Huntsville Museum of Art. Ten solo exhibits include those at Forsythe in Art at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, MT Burton Gallery, The Barrier Islands Center and Museum, American Littoral Society, Wetlands Institute, New Jersey Museum of Boating, Ocean City Art Center, Watermark Gallery, and the Tyme Gallery.
Alice has multiple years of experience teaching painting and observational drawing techniques to beginning and advanced art students, as well as, to students with little or no art experience. Alice teaches Foundation courses in Drawing and 2D Design at Stockton University and has over 30 years teaching fine arts in private and public K-12 schools.
Alice lives in Tuckerton, New Jersey, where she moved because of the connection she forged at the age of 10 with the marshes at the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. The focus of her paintings in the MFA program of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was salt marshes of the New Jersey coast. She has devoted the last 40 years to painting salt marshes in all seasons of the year.
 Burton Shore
Oil on linen (12in x 20in)
|
