Marion Behr
As a young child, I had a passion for coloring and painting. At seven, I won the local and national awards for illustrating Dimples and Cocksure, a Random House publication, by Phyllis Frazer. The prizes were three books of art throughout the ages. One book contained a painting by Ed Chavez, who later became my mentor and advisor at Syracuse University, where I received my B.A. in Art Education, - Minor,- in English, and MFA in painting.
My first professional projects entailed designing covers for McCall's, Family Circle, and other national craft magazines. Next, I illustrated The Jewish Holiday book for Doubleday. I then formed my publishing house and compiled and published two editions of Women Working Home:, the Homebased Business Guide and Directory, in 1981 and 1983. The books ignited magazine articles and T.V. interviews, as well as a great deal of lecturing and traveling. My imagination was constantly stimulated. The books sold out. I was anxious to get back to creating art.
It was the right time to return to sculpting and painting in both my home studio and at Parsons, where I rediscovered a fascination for printmaking which only grew during my assistantship with Master Printer Mohammad Khallil in his classes at the Print Studio of Parsons. A press soon found its way into my home studio. I was painting, printing and involved in a number of shows. Then, while creating deeply etched, embossed plates, I became ill from over exposure to acid.
As a result of this negative reaction my husband and I developed a new and ecologically safe etching process which we called ElectroEtch. Our invention was granted two patents and named the “Patent of the Week” in The New York Times. Receiving the Charles Lindbergh Grant in Arts and Science enabled us to teach this method in the USA and abroad. Many prints were born through my exploration of ElectroEtch. Some of these prints, along with articles, found their way into Leonardo, Chemtech, Journal of the Print World and Printmaking Today.
My prints, paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and are in numerous collections, including the Bank Gesellschaft Gallery, Berlin, the Smithsonian, the Royal Thai collection, Ben Shahn Gallery, Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima Peru, and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín Etna, Mexico.
Inspired by women experienced with breast cancer, in one of my more recent larger projects, I created 30 sculptures formed from discarded radiation cradles, developed to encourage women to be aware of early breast cancer detection. A number of solo shows followed with these works. A panel discussion at one of these shows ignited the idea for my fourth book,: Surviving Cancer: Our Voices and Choices, which I compiled, illustrated and published. It proudly wears three medals, including a gold from IPPY.
More recently, I've returned to speaking through drawings and paintings.
However, I'm anxious to use words now to say: "I'm grateful to all those who helped along the
way and thank Longyear Gallery for including me as a member in this special Gallery".