Eileen Mueller
Muses

Trident Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Eileen Mueller’s recent oil paintings of the landscapes and sea vistas of Cape Ann, which add a fresh, intimate, and modern chapter to the continuing story of American art told on Cape Ann since the mid-nineteenth century.

Mueller has lived and painted on Cape Ann for more than twenty-five years: she has inhabited its places of beauty, discovered its enclaves, studied its legendary light, and found creative sustenance as a devoted and valued member of its cultural institutions. The native muses of stone and sea, the landscape and its people, provide her subject matter; and native muses inspire her painting style.

The exhibition Muses reveals the consequences of a turning point in Mueller’s work when, five years ago, restless, she began to shed the prevailing idioms of Cape Ann painting, liberating passion and talent for expressiveness and abstraction. Her recent work enlarges the legacies of the region’s modernist stars: in her new paintings are the monumental forms of Marsden Hartley, the abstract energy of Nell Blaine, the astonishing freedom of Zygmund Jankowski’s brush, and the glowing details of contemporary impressionism, all expounded with a balanced intimacy of contact between perceiving subject and perceived object which is uniquely her own.

Mueller has studied at deCordova Museum, Montserrat College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her paintings have been shown widely in New England and New York and have been collected by the Cape Ann Museum and other prestigious institutions. She is a Copley Artist in the Copley Society of Art and a member of the North Shore Arts Association.