American landscape painter Mary Sipp Green, based in the bucolic Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, has a superlative ability to engage the viewer in the emotive atmosphere of her landscapes and seascapes. The intensely saturated colors in her works evoke an immediate sense of place and a unique perspective on an intimate tableau. Sipp Green achieves an ethereal, nuanced quality in her paintings that imparts a refined and inimitable serenity. In Every Hour of the Light: The paintings of Mary Sipp Green, many of the subjects she paints—salt marshes, barns, meadows, rivers, and the occasional cityscape—are captured in the exquisite twilight of early evenings or a luminescent sunrise. The effect is dreamy yet grounded and familiar.

Sipp Green states, “While my preferred medium has always been oil on linen, my methods, techniques, and aesthetic aims have all undergone significant transformations since I first began. I learned my craft in the studio, painting still lifes and portraits, as well as landscapes drawn directly from nature. Over time, I became increasingly engaged with more abstract and spiritual aspects of the landscape form and I began to pursue a less representational, more expressive style.” When describing her “diffuse quality of color,” she explains, “I use many layers of paint, allowing each to dry before the next is applied. Along the way, the surface of the paint is often refigured in unpredictable ways, and there is much that has to be scraped, sanded, destroyed and reapplied before the essence of a place, its mood and atmosphere, finally emerges onto the canvas.”

Sipp Green’s work is widely collected in prominent private and public collections, including the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, part of the Springfield Museum of Art quadrangle in Springfield, Massachusetts, where her large oil painting Twilight Falls in South County hangs in the museum’s entryway, and The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

Beth Venn is the executive director of the Neltje Center for Excellence in Creativity and the Arts at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Previously, she was curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and senior curator of the department of American Art at The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, she was associate curator of the Permanent Collection and later was the director of their branch museums. Louis Zona, PhD, is the executive director and chief curator of The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH.

Table of Contents: 7
Dedication: 10
Acknowledgments: 11
Foreword | Louis Zona, PhD: 13
The Mysterious Dimensions of the Everyday: The Pursuits of Mary Sipp Green | Beth Venn: 15
Paintings: 41
Landscapes: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter: 42
Flower Fields: 82
Wharfs and Waterscapes: 94
Atmospheric Abstracts: 120
Works on Paper: 133
Tyringham Valley: 134
Hillsides: 136
Roads and Rivers: 139
Interiors: 143
Flowers: 146
Selected Chronology: 149
Selected Solo Shows: 152
Selected Group Shows: 153
Bibliography: 154
Photograph Credits: 155
Copyright Page: 156

It is difficult to comfortably position Green along the continuum of American landscape painting. While her work shares certain tenets of Hudson River School paintings—wide landscapes featuring vast skies and the particular plays of light at dawn and dusk—it also emphasizes the land’s inherent spirituality, a quality so often seen in the work of the Luminists. At times, her brushstrokes mimic the dotting and patterning of the Impressionists and her broad strokes some of the non-objectivity of the Abstract Expressionists. When noting her influences, Green refers to figures as divergent as the mid-nineteenth-century landscapist George Inness, the twentieth-century color-field master Mark Rothko, and the late paintings of the enigmatic modernist Albert Pinkham Ryder. . . . Green responds to how her paintings progress: she gleans valuable insights when she deals with their development rather than how closely they conform to her original ideas. And, in turn, her landscapes engage viewers by inviting them to drift into the space, to experience the light and atmosphere, to become entranced by the cloaks of color, and to reflect upon comparable places that have punctuated their own lives.