Fans of painter Gretchen Dow Simpson, and there are many, know that she's fascinated by architectural details: the zigzag play of light across a clapboard wall, for example, or the crisply minimalist lines of a classic New England farmhouse.... The new studio should provide plenty of room for Simpson to display her 2005 Pell Award, which she is to receive Friday at the annual awards ceremony and fundraiser sponsored by Trinity Repertory Company.
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Now 66 ("and proud of it," she says), Simpson is best know known for the cover illustrations she produced for the The New Yorker magazine between 1974 and 1995. During that period, her pared-down views of New England architecture appeared more than 60 times on the The New Yorker's cover—a remarkable run for an artist who dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design after only two years.

"Basically, there was a lot of pressure from home," she says. "Part of it was financial, since I had younger siblings at home who also wanted to go to college. Plus, I don't think my parents really relished the idea of having an Abstract Expressionist painter for a daughter."

After leaving RISD in 1959, Simpson got married and spent most of the next decade raising a family. Then, in 1974, she got a call from the The New Yorker's newly hired art director, Lee Lorenz, who had seen some of the cover illustrations Simpson had been submitting, on and off, since the mid-1960s.

"He told me that he liked the abstract stuff I was doing, but that it didn't really fit what the magazine was looking for," Simpson recalls. "He suggested trying something more realistic, but still with an abstract 'feel.' "

As for what Simpson should paint, Lorenz said simply: "Paint what you like."

"Artistically, that was the big 'aha' moment," Simpson says. "I started thinking: What do I really like? What do I want to paint? Eventually, I realized that having grown up in Cambridge [(Mass.)], I really liked New England architecture."