Dorothy F. Foster

Dorothy F. Foster was born in 1903 in Jersey City. After her mother, a dressmaker, moved her family to Manhattan, Foster studied art and interior design at Cooper Union. She went on to design textiles for a living, working at the clothier A. Sulka and pursuing other artistic interests in her free time, such as poetry and painting. During the last decade of her life, Foster created thousands of ballpoint pen drawings on pages torn from magazines and newspapers, incorporating the found designs into her ethereal patterns and figurations. Foster filled over a dozen photo albums with her self-described “doodles,” which were discovered and exhibited 25 years after her death in 1986.

Foster employed all manner of ephemera as a medium for her drawings, including envelopes, paper plates, and the backs of postcards. Using ballpoint pens and colored pencils, the artist renders dreamlike, sometimes cartoonish patterns and figures on the found media, often returning to visual motifs of red-haired women and elfin figures in pointed hats. A black border, created through the furious application of a black ballpoint pen, frames many of the works and adds a theatrical quality to each piece, as though the scene takes place on a stage. The artist’s geometric patterns recall her decorative background designing silk ties and other textiles. Foster presents found images in a new context or erases the original image completely, leaving only the artist’s balanced compositions and rich color palette in their place.