Rose Mary Gonnella-Butler

Following undergraduate work at Rutgers University, Gonnella-Butler completed an M.F.A. degree in painting and drawing at Rochester Institute of Technology and studied computer graphics at the School of Visual Arts in New York. During the past several years she has served as instructor at Rutgers, Kean College, and the Newark Museum Studio School. Gonnella-Butler is fascinated with simple shapes and contrasting degrees of color opacity and employs imaginary color harmonies t0 evoke questions of time, impermanence, and change. She sets simple still-life arrangements and household objects into domestic scenes, and through altered scale, artificially arranged light, and manipulated space, her interiors take on the atmosphere of doll houses.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)