?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
NELL BLAINE Portrait of Dilys Evans.
Oil on canvas, 1962. 405x303 mm; 16x11 7/8 inches. Signed in oil, upper left recto, and dedicated and dated in ink, verso.
Ex-collection the artist, New York; Dilys Evans, New York; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection, New Mexico.
Blaine (1922-1996) studied with Hans Hoffmann before moving to New York and immersing herself in the Second Generation of New York School abstract expressionist painters. She was the youngest member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1944. Later in her career she was drawn towards working in a more representational style, blending it with her dynamic brushwork reminiscent of her earlier Abstract Expressionist paintings.
In the 1950s, she met Dilys Evans, a nurse who helped Blaine recouperate from polio complications at Mount Sinai Hostpital, New York. Blaine has noted that Evans brought her paint and canvas to the hospital while she was recovering from polio so she could produce art. They eventually become lovers, and together they traveled extensively, including to the UK, St. Lucia, and Gloucester, among other locations.
