Mariella Bisson

Born in Vermont, Mariella Bisson first learned to draw in a one-room schoolhouse in East Burke. She earned a BFA in Drawing and minored in Art Education at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She earned an MS in Museum Education at Bank Street College of Education. She worked as a curator and arts educator in New York’s museums and parks until moving to the Catskills in 2001. Bisson’s work has won grants from the Pollock Krasner, Gottlieb, and Vogelstein Foundations, The Joyce Dutka Foundation and Robert Rauschenberg’s Change Foundation. She has painted waterways, forests and rocks at Artist residencies including Byrdcliffe, Banff Centre for the Arts, Hambidge, Vermont Studio Center and Santa Fe Art Institute. Bisson seeks out dramatic landscape sites to observe and draw rock formations and currents of water in constant tension and motion. Public collections include the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, The Hinsom Art Museum at Wingate University, Gelsenkirchen Museum in Germany, Philip Morris Companies, Pfizer, Dunn & Bradstreet. Her work is in many hospital collections including Memorial Sloan Kettering in NYC and NJ and The Mayo Clinic. Mariella’s work in watercolor forms the underpinnings of her compositions. She has often used miniature watercolors to create paintings up to eight feet tall or wide. She believes in the power of water, the beauty of water and the joy of watercolor.