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Ann Chernow: About

Ann Chernow

Longtime Westport resident painter and printmaker known for her portrait-like illustrations

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Who is Ann Chernow?

Ann Chernow’s art is intimate. She creates private moments,  engaging us in a contemporary narrative with a remembered past.  Her work addresses the human condition. Chernow's entire oeuvre includes  paintings, drawings and prints.  The work is related by themes, among which are: communication, gesture, glance, waiting, self absorption, loneliness, anxiety , optimism, tenderness, alienation, fatigue, and confidence.

In 1945 when her family moved to Flushing, Queens, the town boasted two major movie houses: Loews Prospect and RKO Keiths.  Both were within a few blocks of Chernow’s apartment. From age 11 on,  she and friends would escape into the fantasy world of  film and the figment of the theater being  ‘home.’ Every genre of  l940s film fare – the womens’  “weepies,” Westerns, war movies, mysteries, science fiction, serials and newsreels –fascinated the young viewer and became the lifelong  basis for her work.

In 1957, she participated in her first New York gallery show, at the Duncan Gallery, which began her serious attention as an artist. Chernow’s aesthetic vision defies pigeonholing. She works in the tradition of artists termed “painter/printmaker”. Her original  purpose: to preserve a genre’s cinematic moment, to transpose nostalgia, to juxtapose fantasy and reality.

Chernow has created a personal, defining body of work that is recognized as unique: moments of suspended reality based on material from all aspects of American movies from the 1930s and 1940s,  totally reinvented in her own vocabulary. Her attention to images of women dominating the content of her work brings an underlying sexual politic. Continue reading from Ann Chernow Art

Link to Westport Local Artists Resource Guide Series