Florence Melva Pierce née Miller (July 27, 1918 – October 25, 2007) was an American artist best known for her innovative resin relief paintings.
As a child traveling to New Mexico to visit her mother's family in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Miller became familiar with the landscape which would later become her home.
[2] It was Ashton who introduced Miller to the Phillips Collection, considered to be the first museum of Modern Art in the United States.
[citation needed] Miller spent considerable time at the museum and began to take classes at the Studio School there in 1935.
The Russian mystic painter, Roerich, felt that art had the ability to change world consciousness and promote peace and brotherhood.
[4] Bisttram had brought these spiritual values with him to Taos, where in addition to rigorous exercises in composition and color theory, he expected his students to read books on Transcendentalism and Theosophy, including works by Emerson, Nietzsche, Jung, and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
[2][5] In 1938 Bisttram invited Miller and her husband Horace Pierce to join the Transcendental Painting Group, which he co-founded with artist Raymond Jonson.
[2] The Pierces had moved to New York City to seek funding for a film project Horace was working on.
[4] Although he was given an exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art in 1940, the impending war made finding real backing for the film difficult.
[2][4] In 1942 the couple moved to Los Angeles, encouraged by artists they knew who lived and worked in L.A. in the film industry.
[4] Following the onset of health issues and economic setbacks Horace Pierce decided the family should move back to New Mexico in 1946.
She began carving in a variety of materials including polyurethane, Styrofoam, balsa wood cement, and stone.
On the stones and foam pieces appear some of the basic geometric forms from both early paintings and later resin works (circles, triangles, crescents) but also at times textured grains and amorphous forms that suggest fossils emerging from stone or a forgotten glyphic language.
[2] The origin of the resin works, which Pierce would go on to explore, refine, and create for the rest of her artistic life, is well known.
[2][4] Art critic Julie Sasse writes of these pieces, "Whereas her earlier easel paintings relied on color and light, these new works created their own emanating glow ..."[4] Pierce's experimentation with the physically arduous process of pouring resin continued.
She created a variety of effects, from smooth or matte finishes to delicate crumples or fabric-like folds, all of which subtly and sensually change the way a viewer might experience the color and light of the piece.
[2][6][7] Pierce also continued to experiment with forms, and though hung from the wall like paintings, these works retained a sense of sculpture.
It is hard to imagine bluer blues or more skull-piercing oranges or more mysterious reds than those Pierce achieved.
A distillation of years of practice as an artist and the exploration of the philosophies she had been introduced to as a young girl, Pierce said of them, "The whites are my favorite, because I feel I've done the most with the least ... My works are contemplative.