“Irene had taken art classes at the Whitney Museum and MoMA while living in New York, but she did not blossom as an artist until arriving in California. With her young sons now in school she worked in watercolor and then began to develop a series of large abstracts painted with Magna — an early form of acrylic paint — on unprimed canvas. She achieved subtle and unexpected effects, generating imagery that was inspired by the natural surroundings of her new home. In Peter’s words: ‘Irene devised her very own vocabulary of visual expression and her own ways of physically achieving these results in an amazingly spontaneous, yet controlled way.’” (1)

“Stern’s pure abstract forms call to mind the stained canvases of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, but her work embodies a unique elegance that differentiates it from that of her color field contemporaries. Where Louis harnessed the power of gravity to pull his pigments down the canvas and Frankenthaler very deliberately pushed her paints around, Stern’s colors seem to grow and blossom organically across the composition. These blooms of pure color manage to be simultaneously serene and dramatic as they radiate warm, earthy tones.” (2)

In 1981, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden acquired three of her large-scale paintings. (wiki) Stern’s painting activity significantly declined in the 1980s as she became her husband’s primary caregiver following his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.

Sources: Wikipedia; (1) John Seed May 17, 2022, The Love and Art of Irene and Peter Stern, https://hyperallergic.com; (2) www.hollistaggert.com