“Since I was a child, my sister was the science girl and I was the arty one. I got dizzy and blanked out when discussions of science and math would begin. I took biology twice in college and the second time I wrote a long letter to the professor at the end of my final exam, explaining that this was the sum total of my knowledge and I promised never to enter the sciences. For the next forty years, I kept my promise……….”
Enid Blechman, CEO Adipose Industries
I was born and raised in New York City but now consider myself a Florida Artist. Currently, I reside on the Florida coast with my rescue dog Uncle Oscar. Two lifelong dreams powered my desire to succeed. One of them, to live by the ocean, is a reality at last. The other, to travel into space may only be fulfilled in my mind.
I received an honors scholarship to attend Savannah College of Art and Design at the age of fifty-nine. There I received a second Master’s Degree of Fine Arts in painting. Driven to catch up to current art practice and my computer savvy fellow students, I graduated summa cum laude. One year after receiving my degree, my work was shown in a solo show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I filled two rooms with paintings and built an installation in the third. I have been busy ever since.
I received the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, have been featured in New American Painting/Artists of the South and was chosen as one of the top ten visual artists in Palm Beach County by the Broward Times. I have been in numerous group and solo shows. My latest solo show at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum highlighted my ecological interests, in this case the toxic algae problem currently afflicting Florida and threatening the Everglades. After a recent residency in Beijing, I began work on a monumental piece for a new cancer hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. The piece titled Slices of the Sea, consists of 10,000 hand painted microscope slides on forty wood panels and was hung in August 2018 in the main lobby of the hospital.
Most recently, inspired by the vastness of the landscape and sky at a residency in Wyoming, I began a new series of drawing. I turned the ocean upside down to become the first astronaut of the sea. Sometimes, dreams do come true.
The SCAD Museum of Art presents "The Red Divers of the Everglades: The Battle Begins," an exhibition by SCAD alumna Enid Blechman (M.F.A., painting, 2013). Using scratched drawings, brilliant color, and humor as tools to intrigue viewers, the artist highlights environmental issues in, but not limited to, the state of Florida.
