Sally Van Doren
Sally Van Doren’s lyrical work explores the fertile cognitive territory between word and image. An award-winning poet, her drawings and poems arise from the same source: over 12,000 notebook pages of illegible handwriting. Her new work employs an expanding personal iconography of calligraphic gestures, letters, geometric forms, design motifs and handprints. Layered upon each other, they engage in a dialogue fundamental to a poet’s relationship with language and an artist’s relationship to line, color and form.
Her ongoing written and visual text, “The Sense Series,” was part of a multi-media performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. She has exhibited at the Cornwall Library in CT and a solo show opens at the Longview Art Gallery in St. Louis in June 2021. Her art is featured recently in the literary magazines december and The 2River View and appears on the cover of Promise, her 2017 book of poems from LSU Press. Widely published in national and international poetry journals such as Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, the New Republic and American Poet, she is also the author of the poetry collections Sibilant, Possessive and Sex at Noon Taxes, winner of the Walt Whitman Award.
She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has taught poetry at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Washington University and the St. Louis Public Schools. Born and raised in St. Louis, she works from her studio in West Cornwall CT.
AELP, 2022, Graphite, colored pencil, marker, oil pastel, gouache and ink on Arches paper, 12 x 9 inches
BELU, 2022, Graphite, colored pencil, marker, oil pastel, gouache and ink on Arches paper, 12 x 9 inches
AHTW, 2022, Graphite, colored pencil, marker, oil pastel, gouache and ink on, Arches paper, 12 x 9 inches
OPST, 2022, Graphite, colored pencil, marker and ink on Arches paper, 12 x 9 inches
UNCIA 4, 2022, Graphite, colored pencil, marker, oil pastel and spray paint on Arches paper, 12 x 9 inches