Phyllis A. Eifert book signing to be held at TFAC
Tryon Fine Arts Center will host a reception and book signing for local resident, artist and author Phyllis Allen Eifert on Wednesday, Dec. 14 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
“I started this project in an effort to collect my work for my children,” Eifert said. “As the project developed, it resulted in an inspirational and moving piece of work that is biographical, technical but mostly intensely personal.”
The following paragraphs included in this article are excerpts from a recent review of Eifert’s book written by Laurence Wassong.
“Her new art book “Sixty Two Years of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture” documents over three decades of Eifert’s life as an artist with more than 100 works on paper, paintings, ceramic sculptures and bronzes. They range from austere pen and ink renderings to sculptures that will forever celebrate the elegance and grace of her soul subject, the horse.
“Rarely can one see an inclusive portrait of a restless artist for whom the act of sculpting is a way of thinking, exploring, honoring, experimenting, rendering homage and inventing the art of revealing the horse – sometimes all at once. These seldom seen, often revealing pieces represented in her book show her prodigious inventiveness and a refusal to settle for a single visual language. Her interpretation of the horse and horse and rider are attested to by carefully adjusted touches that translate into an evocative language of the immediacy and intensity of her subjects.
“Dedi McHam states in the forward of Eifert’s book, ‘When you experience Phyllis Allen Eifert’s art, you are looking at decades of study in various mediums, hours of practice, trial and error, tears and passion in the fullest sense. She has studied her subject from all angles, felt its surfaces, probed with her trained eye, and delved into it with myriad techniques.’
“Eifert was an immediately recognized artist, even in her earliest school days in Lynchburg, Va. After college she studied art at the Moore Institute, the Pensylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the prestigious Barnes Foundation and SUNY in New York. She had experience as an illustrator, an advertising art director, a fabric designer and a source of collectable hunting sculptures for Abercrombie and Fitch.
“Phyllis Eifert has presented us with the unique idea of showing and explaining an artist’s entire body of work in one book and in her own time. She includes her evolution and growth as an artist with vivid representation of her pen and ink drawings, her paintings, equine ceramics, papier mache sculptures, and bronzes. This handsome book begins with her fastidous drawings as a youth and goes on to explore the range of classic art from a gifted and natural artist. It is a rare chance to view her works together and for artist and patron alike, understand how an artist evolves. Eifert’s oeuvre includes nudes, still lifes, landscapes: themes and variations in illustration and paint and three varieties of sculpture that culminate in her evolution of and obsession with… the horse.
“Life today changes so rapidly. Finance, governments, technology, science…all facets of our daily lives worshiped and demonized in the brief periods of time. But art, Phyllis Eifert’s art, is forever.”
“Sixty Two Years of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture,” by Phyllis Allen Eifert, will be available for browsing and purchase during the reception at TFAC on Dec. 14.
For more information on the book, visit the website at www. phyllisalleneifert.com. If you would like to attend the reception, please call Tryon Fine Arts Center at 828-859-8322.
– article submitted by Marianne Carruth