Biography
Bing (Marian Bingham) has created a series of paintings of horses that are both physically dynamic and poetically evocative. Bing's paintings are tactile experiences, from whose often dense surfaces the images seem to emerge. The horses that the artist depicts are very much immersed in the natural world, yet seem timeless. These are dream horses, capable of flight and independent, even when they carry a rider on their back.
Bing grew up in Berkeley, CA, in a family that encouraged her early interest in art. Her involvement with painting deepened on trips with her parents to Europe and to Asia, where her father pursued his work as a professor of Oriental history. While living in the Philippines and Hong Kong in the 1960's, Bing studied traditional Chinese brush painting. The aesthetics of Chinese art, with its sense of space, devotion to nature, and abstract suggestion of form was an important formative influence on the artist's vision.
Having moved east in the early 1960s, Bing began studying art at the New School with the painter Raphael Soyer. From his classes, Bing gained an appreciation for the sensitive handling of paint and for the layering of color, concerns that have remained prominent in her process. She continued to develop her involvement with art during a fifteen year period when she worked as a representative for her husband, a corporate photographer. In 1991, Bing resumed her art education, first at Connecticut College, and then at Wesleyan University, where she received an MA in Liberal Studies with a Concentration in Art in 1995. During this period she produced a series of sepia prints based on botanical forms, including grasses, ferns, and lilies. The ephemeral natural forms were photographically transferred to paper or silkscreened onto board, and then worked on with layers of pastel, gouache, or watercolor. Bing's interest in graphic work continues with the creation of an ongoing series of monotypes.
A decade of living on a Connecticut farm with horses, ending in 1998, proved to be crucial in Bing's work. She both drew the animals from life and imagined their presence in the current series of emotive paintings of horses in the landscape, using oil glazes on highly textured surfaces. These paintings have been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions, including those at the University of Connecticut, So Hyun Gallery and Gallery BAI in New York, and Northwood University, Cedar Hill, TX. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the National Museum of Women in Art, Washington, DC. Bing lives and works in Greenwich, CT and in France.
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