Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
The Poetics of Biology
Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio (b. 1955, Paris, France) is an abstract painter and fiber artist whose work is a vibrant exploration of color, emotion, and the cycle of life. Self-taught for most of her life after first picking up a brush at age seventeen in 1970s Paris, her artistic path included periods of experimentation with various media and pauses before she fully recommitted to painting. This recommitment was solidified upon completing her MFA in Visual Art from the Institute of Art and Design at New England College in January 2020. She also holds a Master's in Art History (1993) and Museum Studies (2015).
Art as a Dance of Trauma and Celebration
Working in her studio at the Western Avenue Studios and Lofts in Lowell, MA, Delaunay-Danizio creates organic shapes and abstract landscapes that balance joy and tension. Her practice, which she identifies as Abstract Expressionism, is driven by internal rhythms and a "lust for life," serving as a dance of trauma and celebration. With visual puns, humor, and evocations of organisms and internal and external body parts, she crafts a "poetics of biology" that challenges boundaries—between genders, human and non-human, body, and landscape.
Her mantra, “All that lives shall die,” informs her artistic process, which reenacts the wonder of living and the inevitability of decay. The act of creation is a reminder of the cycle of birth, growth, death, and renewal.
Process and Influences
Delaunay-Danizio's artistic heritage finds sources in early twentieth-century masters such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Bourgeois, whose legacy she finds continually relevant. As a young artist in Paris, she was profoundly influenced by the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. She also finds contemporary affinity with American artists of her generation, including Sheila Peppe, Carrie Moyer, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
A former elementary school teacher in France and college-level French instructor in the Boston area, Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio now lives in Lowell, MA near her studio. Her artworks have been exhibited in numerous locations across Massachusetts (Arlington, Cambridge, Boston, Lowell) and New Hampshire (Manchester, Hooksett), as well as in New York City and Luxembourg.
The Delaunay-Danizio Collection
Color, emotions, rhythms.
There is much joy and tension in my practice. I delight in colors and in creating organic shapes and abstract landscapes by layering, erasing and redesigning the initial marks. The result is a visual context filled with hues, rhythm and emotions.
My art is a dance of trauma and celebration, which follows internal rhythms. Lust for life transcends the human body, and challenges boundaries between genders, human and non-human, body and landscape, internal organs and external appearance. My mantra is “All that live shall die.” The act of painting reenacts the wonder of living and the inevitability of decay and serves as a reminder of the cycle of birth, growth, death and renewal.
With humor, visual puns, evocations of organisms, and of internal and external body parts, I create poetics of biology.
The intuitive process of discovery that characterizes my paintings, finds it sources in artists born at the turn of the twentieth century, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Bourgeois. Their legacy is still relevant to my contemporaneity. The sculptor Nikki de Saint Phalle also had a strong influence on me as a young artist coming of age in Paris in the 1970s. I also find affinities with American artists of my generation, Sheila Peppe, Carrie Moyer, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
While staining the canvas and creating random shapes with liquid acrylic paint and ink, I build layers by erasing and redesigning the initial marks. The textile sculptures echo the paintings, through a slower and meditative process of weaving threads around a metal frame.
Artist: Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
The artist created this painting as an experiment with colors and shape. The title came to her afterward. She sees "Hawk" as representing a protective mother, seeing a "Big Bird" and a "Tiny Bird" near it. The hawk’s talons are visible in the painting. The visual interpretation highlights both a sense of fierce protection (the talons) and the dynamic between a large and small bird (mother and child).
Dimensions: 6” x 6”
Media: Acrylic
Artist: Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
"Blue Bloom" is a piece that marks the artist's return to integrating her early drawing techniques into her painting practice, and a new shift toward using the color blue.
Technique and Composition
The piece incorporates automatic drawing—a technique the artist had used extensively on paper, often with a silver ink gel pen, during the beginning of her MFA program.
She translated this drawing style to a larger scale on canvas.
The work features the fluidity and transparency of the paint (likely the blue field). The silver pen drawing was applied to follow the shape of the paint and the different hues, rather than being a tight, predetermined sketch. The artist approaches the drawing as a way to "decipher what it's telling me."
Inspiration and Context
The piece belongs to a series of works influenced by a trip to New Zealand, where the artist was impacted by the fragility of the Earth, the transformation of the land, and the intensity of indigenous art.
This experience, coupled with thoughts of vulnerability, inspired a set of five large canvases, after which she continued with smaller paintings like "Blue Bloom."
Medium: Acrylic
Dimensions: 6” x 4”
Artist: Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
The creation of "Land formation" was a very recent development for the artist. It was the result of a process where she started focusing on landscapes using the same methodology as other pieces (automatic drawing with silver ink), but on a large format and with new materials.
New Direction: This piece represents a move toward landscapes in the artist's work.
Technique: The artist continued her technique of automatic drawing using silver ink on large canvases.
Materials: This painting utilized mixed media and incorporated materials that helped create relief and texture on the surface.
Theme: The focus was on depicting a land formation, likely inspired by her trip to New Zealand where she focused on the fragility and transformation of the Earth.
Dimensions: 40” × 40”
Media: Acrylic & Collage
Artist: Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
This painting was created when the artist was in the phase of "destroying and recreating." It was originally one panel of a huge triptych but she decided to break it down into individual works. The original triptych was a "provocation" about the obsession with the female body and was titled around the idea of a female pig or sow that nurtures its many piglets.
The initial theme of "Andoid Pods" was about the female body, specifically motherhood and nurturing, which led to it having nipples emerging from the canvas. After the artist prepared the canvas, the shape evolved, and she thought of the movie Alien—the idea of the body being invaded by "Alien Pods." This new imagery, still surrounding the original idea, represented the feeling of being "sacrificed as the nurturer" or the mother. It took a significant amount of time sitting in her studio before she could transform the canvas into its current state.
Dimensions: 40” x 36”
Medium: Acrylic
Artist: Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
"Indigo flow" is a large-scale painting that allowed the artist to experiment with the application of color and express a sense of depth and movement.
Scale and Color: This is another large painting that, as the name suggests, heavily features the color indigo or deep blues.
Technique: The artist describes being interested in the fluidity of the paint and experimented with a looser application, using techniques like pouring and letting the paint run before layering and refining the shapes. The artist initially wrote a poem with a silver ink gel paint, which is now hidden beneath a new layer of paint. The resulting artwork is a mysterious palimpsest.
Effect: The goal was to give the paint a quality of transparency and to create a feeling of depth.
Inspiration and Context
The piece belongs to a series of works influenced by a trip to New Zealand, where the artist was impacted by the fragility of the Earth, the transformation of the land, and the intensity of indigenous art.
This experience, coupled with thoughts of vulnerability, inspired a set of five large canvases, after which she continued with smaller paintings like "Blue Bloom." The five large scale paintings are the truly original ones. “Indigo Flow 3” differs from the other 4, by its depth and volume.