About
CELIA RABINOVITCH, an artist, writer and scholar, creates images of light, space and nature in luminous paintings that evoke the uncanny. Shown in Canada, the USA and Europe, her work reflects influences from Imagist poetry, Chinese landscape painting, Zen Buddhism and modern art.
Celia’s paintings have been selected for the Florence Biennale (1999) and Terra Infirma, an international exhibition on climate change, Bernard Heller Museum, New York (2019). Her writing appears in a wide variety of magazines, and she has published two books: Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros and the Occult in Modern Art (2003) and Duchamp’s Pipe: A Chess Romance - Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski (2020).
With an MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in the history of religions and art from McGill University, Montreal, she has both taught and directed programs at universities in Canada and the USA. She has received awards for her work from the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada.
Selected solo exhibitions include The Grotto Cycle, Beck Center Museum, Cleveland; YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto; U. C. Berkeley Jeanne Brewer Gallery; Canessa Gallery, San Francisco; Industrial Romance at the University of California-San Francisco; the California Institute for Integral Studies and the University of Colorado Boulder and Denver. She has been visiting artist and co-chair for graduate painting at Syracuse University, and recently an artist-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada and St. Mary’s College of Maryland (2021). For more, see CV.
How I Work
My work explores the dynamic energies of water, air and nature. I draw from life with charcoal, conte and pastel, combining visual ideas from photographs and collage as a point of departure for painting. The image emerges through layering sheer veils of acrylics, then oils, evoking a sense of recognition through which the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
“In Celia’s work... I have always been struck by the basic structure of the composition even in the hastiest sketch. Her finished work… exercises a hypnotic effect and leaves a vivid and residual image that is hard to shake. Her sense of colour and light, deftly placed by careful application of successive layers of paint, demonstrates control of the medium.”