Art interest

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/may/30/tracey-emin-review-fiercely-honest-artist-bares-body-and-soul?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Not to confuse artist with subject, but there is no question here as to whether it is Emin – even in the works where her face is scrawled out the artist is there, inviting us (quite literally) into the most intimate crevices of her life. Her bed and the life-affirming activities that happened therein are the subject of 11 monotypes created in 2022, and the revelatory titles of I Know You Loved Me – I Know Because I Loved You Too and Because I’m So Fucking Sexy. I Was Born Sexy and I Will Die Sexy read like diary entries.

I Lay Here for You is almost the sequel to A Journey to Death currently on display in Margate where Emin displayed her first selection of work created since her illness. Where the first exhibition teetered on the precipice of life, this new show in Scotland is a step into the future, one bathed in pleasure rather than pain. In nearly every monotype, two figures intertwine, almost indistinguishable from one another, smudges appear beneath their bodies to indicate repetitive movement. Apparently, the series is based on memories of someone who helped Emin during her recovery.

Each monotype starts with the same lithographic background of Emin’s bed and the individual bedroom scenes are added by the artist using Indian ink. Choosing the exact same backdrop from which to add an enraptured couple, a bedside table, a rug, a lamp, or some medical equipment documents the continuous ebb and flow of human connection. Anyone who has invited a fellow human being into their bed will recognise the crushing solitude of staring into the night while they sleep, the frenetic energy of early lovemaking, the security of curling into an embrace and the perfect stillness that descends when alone but loved.

Great short film by Cheri Gaulke. Ecofeminist scholar Gloria Feman Orenstein retells her adventures with Leonora Carrington and other women of surrealism.

Who Discovered Eva Hesse?

Who Discovered Eva Hesse?
A new exhibition focuses on Hesse’s works on paper, and the way they demonstrate the role of drawing in the famed sculptor’s process.

(Sur)reality in the Photography of Kati Horna

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/global-cultures-have-always-worshipped-and-feared-women-180980119/

In ancient Rome, a group of young women known as the Vestal Virgins maintained the everlasting flame that burned in the Forum’s Temple of Vesta—a potent symbol of their civilization’s legitimacy and political power. If they finished their 30-year term with virginity intact, they went on to live a relatively independent life. But if they broke their vow, they were buried alive in a chamber with a small amount of food and water. After all, the blood of these divine women could not fall.

Though ancient cultures elevated some women, they vilified others. ”Feminine Power: the divine to the demonic,” at the British Museum in London through September 25, endeavors to show both sides of female power in ancient and modern cultures around the world, examining female deities who were exalted in some way—even when they were represented as evil.

Visitors will meet Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes, Kali, the Hindu goddess whose very name translates to “She Who Is Death,” Guanyin, the Buddhist’s gender-shifting ideal of compassion, and Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess of war who could both bring disease and heal.

The exhibition spans six continents and 5,000 years, according to its website, which calls it a “cross-cultural look at the profound influence of female spiritual beings within global religion and faith.”

The ancient and modern artworks and devotional objects in the exhibition “shine a light on the diversity of ways in which female authority and femininity have been celebrated, feared and understood, throughout history,” write curators Belinda Crerar and Lucy Dahlsen in a museum blog.

When women were rendered as divine, they often existed to illustrate certain concepts central to the societies that worshiped them. The Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, for example, both represented “war and sexual love,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica—perhaps two sides of the same coin. In a clay relief from the 19th to 18th centuries B.C.E. in south Iraq, the goddess is shown on the back of a lion with arms in the air.

A 1750 B.C.E. clay relief of Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, goddess of both sex and war The Trustees of the British Museum

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1097084546/women-painting-women-museum-modern-art-fort-worth

For decades, women artists have been fighting to get their work on museum gallery walls. Recently, the battle is being won: Various exhibitions across the country feature female’s work. Once visitors notice the change, they see that art can be different when women wield the paintbrushes. Sometimes. And sometimes not.

Nothing much different there, except all the blue, and the beauty of the model and the painting. It’s called Queen Jane Approximately — like the Bob Dylan song.

Gangloff doesn’t seem to be painting blue-as-in-sad. This blue is meditative, relaxed, reflective. The woman, former model and fashion designer Jane Mayle, is a friend — as are all of Gangloff’s models, says Andrea Karnes, curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth exhibition Women Painting Women.

The acrobatic Iraqi women below may be friends (although how long would you shoulder responsibility for a friend this way?). To me, they look more like relatives, maybe sisters, with their beautiful black hair, brows and red, red lips.

Kahraman paints this woman often. Contorted and multiplied as she is here, I see incredible strength. Those powerful legs, the steady gaze and humor — I laughed at first glimpse. But curator Karnes says it’s a salute to “countless displaced women, past and present.” Women who have suffered “disfigurement, violence, sexual abuse,” standing on the shoulders of their predecessors.

So, how do women paint women? It’s less about seeing them differently from men, than showing them different. For centuries, artists’ male gaze saw women as objects of desire, idealized and voluptuous, with luscious white skin and dimpled knees. Women artists in this exhibition, like Alice Neel and Emma Amos and others, show women as differently beautiful: pregnant, overweight, sometimes despondent. As we are, wrapped in our truths.

https://www.timeout.com/london/art/feminine-power-the-divine-to-the-demonic

Lust, destruction, anger and filth: female power in human history is vicious stuff, and this exhibition of ancient sculpture, sacred artifacts and contemporary depictions of goddesses, witches and demons absolutely revels in it.

There’s Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, who erupts and obliterates, but paves the way for new life in the process. There’s Tlazolteolt, the Huaxtec goddess of purification, who inspires sexual desire and eats filth to cleanse transgression. There’s China Supay, the demonic Bolivian embodiment of lust. There’s Athena, Venus, Lilith, Hekate and Eve, and they’re all here as sculptures and paintings and masks.

null

Throughout history, the female spirit has been tempting, lustful, strong, noble, just and compassionate. It is countless things to countless cultures, and the objects here celebrate that dizzying diversity. The China Supay mask is wild and obscene, the statue of Kali with her necklace of severed men’s heads is dark and gory, the images of the Virgin Mary are soft and caring. The female spirit is countless things to countless cultures.But the exhibition is, ironically, a bit of a patronising mess. It opens with screens of word clouds: ‘patient’, ‘unapologetic’, ‘dangerous’. It feels like being stuck in a meeting with a bunch of male ad execs trying to figure out how to flog tampons. The show is also plastered with interpretation and giant quotes by academics and comedians that say stomach-turningly cringe things like ‘it’s time to embrace our lioness instincts’ and ‘it’s almost as if women aren’t allowed emotions, big, complicated, messy emotions’. It’s vacuous and reductive, and totally undermines the rest of the show. Maybe if they really had embraced their lioness instincts, they’d have gone in for the kill and this deep dive into the complex, intense, multi-faceted history of femininity would have felt a little more fierce.Written by Eddy FrankelWednesday 25 May 2022

https://4w.pub/nancy-azara-the-shaman-is-a-feminist-artist/

Nancy Azara: The Shaman is a Feminist Artist

“To be a woman artist even today takes a lot of courage.”

Phyllis Chesler

Ihave been living with the most magnificent sculpture by the great feminist artist, Nancy Azara, for more than fourteen years now. It is a living, breathing work of wall art, it’s vibrant colors enhance every other color in my living room. In this piece, Azara incorporated our handprints, both mine and my partner’s, into a work of gilded gold, magenta/maroon/ruby, red/orange, green, and silver. Its predecessor was an inspired work she did for a hospital hallway in which she incorporated the healing hands of the doctors: “Hand Garden/Doctor’s Wall” (2004).

Azara’s deep magentas are the color of blood, of sacrifice, of death, and of re-birth. It pulses and flows and vibrates in her work. She constructs totems, altars, amulets.

Azara’s sculpture shares my living room with work by other great feminist artists: Helene Aylon, Darla Bjork, Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, and Kate Millett—and with some controversial political art by the Scandinavian artist, Lars Vilks, and a small and endearing piece by Peter Max. Can you imagine the energy, the memories, in this room alone which is also filled with graceful palm fronds and plants?

“(Her work) signifies the collective voice of the feminine reemerging after years of censorship, oppression and violence”

Azara has a new show up at the Carter Burden gallery in New York City for which she prepared a monograph to accompany the exhibition. Unsurprisingly, perfectly, it is titled “Votives.” Indeed, her art is a reverential Ode to the Great Mother, the feminine Divine. In the monograph, the curator and appraiser, Patricia Watts, describes Azara’s use of “richly colored tempera paints made with egg yolk, natural pigments, and handsome gesso combined with her use of 22-carat gold and aluminum leaf to…fuse light with form and color…During the Renaissance, gold leaf adorned altarpieces and represented the spiritual, rather than the physical presence of material wealth.”

In an interview published in the “Votives” monograph, Azara tells art critic, Kay Turner:

“I attended a class in the New York theatre district, costume design…I still light my sculptures in this theatrical manner. I also think that I’ve been influenced by the shapes and tones of light in Roman Catholic church settings.”

Although Azara was raised Catholic, it is as a Second Wave feminist that she has expanded our understanding of the Divine Mother and granted us access to that sacred energy. Azara says: “I wait for the shape to come to me. I communicate with the wood.”

I always thought that Azara should have been hired to create the sets for the opera “Norma,” Bellini’s bel canto work about a Druid High-Priestess whose signature aria is “Casta Diva,” which is a very Catholic-pagan prayer to the Moon Goddess.

Azara also told Turner:

“As a child, I first began to notice wood in furniture and began to understand that they had been trees…the most astounding memory for me, which continues all through my life, is the idea of the trees and the darkness of trees in the rain, the darkness of the trees as the sun goes down , the brightness of the trees as the sun comes out…the way trees move during storms frightens me a lot…They make a sound, a crackling sound, which is really quite amazing.”

A “votive,” (as in a votive candle), is an act of devotion, an expression of gratitude, perhaps also a prayer. Azara does not cut down trees—she seeks out fallen trees, logs, discarded pieces of lumber, and rescues them to release their still living inner being.

“My advice to feminist artists, lesbian artists, feminists, is to follow your vision”

In “Votives,” Azara writes: “Because I love trees, I started as a woodcarver. As a child I felt that they spoke to me and comforted me…..I began to appreciate that looking at and making art has magical properties and healing qualities inherent in it.”

Azara has created beautiful and powerful works such as “Spirit House of the Mother,” (1994) a golden house, a sanctuary or a refuge of sorts, one that a woman can enter and be enclosed in a Goddess‘s embrace, the kind of embrace that so many of us longed for and could not and did not receive in patriarchal families. As artist, scribe and “spiritual gangsta” Katie Cercone writes:

“Azara’s artwork can be quite flashy….her large scale structures reveal towering enclosures and elevated altars to uncompromising female divinity. (Her work) signifies the collective voice of the feminine reemerging after years of censorship, oppression and violence…(upon reading Kay Turner’s work on Women’s Altars) it completely reframed my personal sense of my grandmother’s worship of the Catholic Virgin Mary to view it as an act of self-preservation, resistance, and centering of female divinity amidst the oppressive mind-control of mid-century American Catholicism.”

Azara has sculpted works for her mother (“Leaf Altar for Nunzia. 1913-2004”); and for her granddaughter (“Maxi’s Wall”). I happen to love her “Great Coat” (1997) and her “Jacket from the Silk Road.” (2012). Azara says that this work “has a centerpiece which is a pattern from a thousand years ago. The people in the graves were buried wearing this same jacket which is still popular today.”

I’d wear one while I was still very much alive.

In the 1970s, Azara’s psychic, intuitive, and feminine work was transgressive. Like other Second Wavers, she not only did her own work—she reached out to other artists and art students. In 1979, Azara co-founded the New York Feminist Art Institute (NYFAI) which held workshops, consciousness-raising groups, classes in painting, drawing, and filmmaking, and which honored women artists such as Louise Nevelson, Lenore Tawney, Louise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold, Elaine de Kooning, as well as feminist art historian, Arlene Raven. NYFAI also offered poetry classes and held readings with poets Jewelle Gomez and Ntozake Shange. This undertaking was foundational, a breakthrough. Nothing quite like it could be found anywhere else.

Azara kept on, she kept soldiering on, she kept keeping on, despite the extraordinary obstacles women artists faced—and still do. Azara’s vision is unique, uncompromising, classical.

“When I was young, there were no feminist artists—only ‘lady painters’ and sculptresses and women art students”

Azara’s use of the goddess is, as she told Kay Turner, “a metaphor for women’s self-esteem…nowadays, women are painting themselves as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Buddha. This is a sea change. Women in the feminist spirituality art movement took great liberties with these sacrosanct figures and made them our own.”

In 2007, Nancy began a series of intergenerational dialogues about feminist art. Three generations of artists are still meeting.

In a recent interview, Nancy told me:

“I have been an artist in service to an aesthetic spiritual and political calling….I was mostly slowed down by my own voices that were too critical, held back permission, caused fear. In my generation, I was taught to be silent and pleasant and not to question. When I was young, there were no feminist artists—only “lady painters” and sculptresses and women art students who were expected to make good supportive wives to their husbands. To be a woman artist even today takes a lot of courage.”
“When I was younger, I was influenced by African art, and Native American art, especially the spiritual references in it. And art from India has been a major love of mine, probably for the same reason. Folk Art, for its sincerity is a major love too.”

Azara has been influenced by the painter, Edwin Dickinson, and she loves the work of “Meret Oppenheim, Lenore Tawney, and the German Expressionist sculptors. (She) also thinks that “Louise Bourgeois is an amazing artist, as is Eva Hesse and Louise Nevelson.

Azara still holds annual workshops, teaches, and mentors other artists. She is also the author of “Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art.” It is available through Red Wheel/Weiser. Her work may be found in Collections at the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Modern Museum of Art, National Gallery of Women in the Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

When I asked Nancy who has helped her in terms of her work, she answered:

“I have been helped by many persons along the way, some artists, some not. My advice to feminist artists, lesbian artists, feminists, is to follow your vision.”

See more of Nancy’s Art:

https://www.nancyazara.com/large-scale-installations
https://www.nancyazara.com/feminist-structures-and-altar-works

Continuing Practice

Painting gives me joy. I use it as a balm when I am world weary. . . .. . .

Latest piece a large 1mx1m with acrylics

A self portrait done during a period of deep depression

In honour of Louise Bourgeois philosophy of do, undo, redo. . . I redid a sculpture I made a year ago. It is on a bigger scale. The bra element is more obvious, and the expression is more jubilant.

It’s a;ways good to have people model to practice practice, practice but I’m the absence I will always use my own face. . . . .

Also a reminder of where this journey has come from. I found the teabag curtains I made for my final piece in the foundation degree. I cut them up and framed them. . . . .. . They prompted my continued journey into the world of senior women and their bodies

Stuff that I have read or thought about recently . . .

Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was a trailblazer. Born in Italy, she found herself at the centre of Hollywood in the 1920s, the post-Revolution era of Mexico, in the midst of Communism with the Muralists, the latter of which she captured through raw images, using her camera – her tool – to engage with political and social issues. Nothing short of a revolutionary, Modotti documented the spirit of era. Her own life was never far from drama. Raised in Italy, in1913 she migrated to the US to join her father. Adored for her striking looks, she soon began work as a model, then an actor, starring ina string of Hollywood silent films. Taking up photography, in 1923she moved to Mexico City to join the cultural avant-garde and experimented with intimate, hazy studies of close-up wilted flowers and light-filled architectural environments – some of the earliest examples of abstraction in photography. As the 1920s progressed, and her involvement in the Communist movement deepened (officially joining the party in 1927), Modotti turned her lens towards social documentary, photographing empathetic, yet I think triumphant, portraits of locals and labourers, and took her camera to anti-fascist, leftist rallies (with friends Frida Kahlo andDiego Rivera). However, following the assassination of her then-lover, the Cubist revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, she was forced to leave Mexico and abandon photography entirely. Fleeing Mexico for WeimarBerlin, Soviet Russia and then Spain, in 1939 she returned to MexicoCity, but died three years later in the back of a taxi… Some still question the cause of her death, viewing it with suspicion due to her ardently leftist

“I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.” – Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet
“The real function of art is to change mental patterns … making new thought possible.”
https://www.artsy.net/artist/jean-dubuffet

MELINDA K. HALL
“Someone once asked who had given me permission to paint the way I do. I thought that was a wonderful question because in it was the implication that the work was somehow outside of some set of rules to which a painter had to comply. Painting is not a matter of rules, rather it is an arena of freedom and creative liberty where no permission is required -that is, if one paints authentically.
My style evolved in the struggle of push and pull between artist and canvas, in the space of my own private, quirky, little battleground of observation, interpretation, intention and application. What has resulted is a visual journal, a commentary on many universal subjects. As paint and brushes are my tools so are humor, metaphor, playfulness, color and text. I want the work to be initially accessible. I like to draw the viewer into the environment of the painting, invite them to stay a while and there discover more subtle aspects of the work.”
http://melinda-k-hall.com/2016-on-the-loose/2016-room-4.html

B. LUCY STEVENS
https://www.instagram.com/blucystevens/
https://www.facebook.com/MelindaKHallStudio
https://www.facebook.com/blucysteven

VERED GERSZTENKORN
https://www.instagram.com/vered_gersztenkorn/
https://www.facebook.com/vered.gersztenkor

Kiki Smith
“Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I’m given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one’s own vision.”

Dr. Sophie Berrebi introduces the exhibition ‘Seventy Years of The Second Sex’ in Zurich

Tracey Emin on meeting Louise Bourgeois for the first time and exploring her studio “It’s like I had crept into this other world…” | Hayward Gallery Shorts
Emin met Bourgeois for the first time in 2008. Despite their distinct backgrounds, what followed was a late life friendship, culminating in one of the last creative collaborations in the legendary artists life – a series of prints tilted 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘈𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘔𝘦 which took Emin two years to complete (2009-10)
We joined Emin in her studio this month to discuss Bourgeois’ place in art history, the extraordinary depth within her working practice and the ‘baton’ she passes to the next generation of artists that follow her…

Over the course of her brief career, Francesca Woodman produced haunting photographs that featured the feminine form in space.
In her beguiling portraits—including many self-portraits—she captured her subjects blurred in motion or partially hidden behind furniture.
Woodman’s compositions, aided by her long exposures, offer ghostly meditations on sexuality, identity, and the construction of the self. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she developed her practice as she took inspiration from Surrealist photographers such as Man Ray and Claude Cahun. She did not exhibit widely before her untimely death at age 22, but her work has since been world wide shown.
With her simultaneously confessional and
obscuring approach to her subjects, Woodman paved the way for photographers such as Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman. (Source: Artsy)
Untitled, Rome, 1977-1978
Gelatin silver print, printed 2006
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)

“No piece of art has ever emotionally affected me the way this robot arm piece has. It’s programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that’s constantly leaking out and required to keep itself running…if too much escapes, it will die so it’s desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day. Saddest part is they gave the robot the ability to do these ‘happy dances’ to spectators. When the project was first launched it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. Many years later… (as you see it now in the video) it looks tired and hopeless as there isn’t enough time to dance anymore.. It now only has enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked hydraulic fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew over time. Living its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out… (Figuratively and literally as its hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like it’s actual blood).
“The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fluid in 2019, slowly came to a halt and died – And I am now tearing up over a friggin robot arm 😭 It was programmed to live out this fate and no matter what it did or how hard it tried, there was no escaping it. Spectators watched as it slowly bled out until the day that it ceased to move forever. Saying that ‘this resonates’ doesn’t even do it justice imo. Created by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, they named the piece, ‘Can’t Help Myself’. What a masterpiece. What a message.”
Extended interpretations: the hydraulic fluid in relation to how we kill ourselves both mentally and physically for money just in an attempt to sustain life, how the system is set up for us to fail on purpose to essentially enslave us and to steal the best years of our lives to play the game that the richest people of the world have designed. How this robs us of our happiness, passion and our inner peace. How we are slowly drowning with more responsibilities, with more expected of us, less rewarding pay-offs and less free time to enjoy ourselves with as the years go by. How there’s really no escaping the system and that we were destined at birth to follow a pretty specific path that was already laid out before us. How we can give and give and give and how easily we can be forgotten after we’ve gone.. How we are loved and respected when we are valuable, then one day we aren’t any longer and we become a burden…and how our young, free-caring spirit gets stolen from us as we get churned out of the broken system that we are trapped inside of. Can also be seen to represent the human life cycle and the fact that none of us make it out of this world alive. But also can act as a reminder to allow yourself to heal, rest and love with all of your heart. That the endless chase for ‘more’ isn’t necessary in finding your own inner happiness.”
James Kricked Parr

Sir Terry Frost
It is True
1989
Frost was a major figure in the second generation of St Ives artists. Although he is primarily known as an abstract painter, printmaking was a major part of his artistic output throughout his career. The prints in the series Eleven Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca were produced to accompany a suite of poems by Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. As the hearts suggest, ‘It is True’ is based on a love poem. Lorca conveys longing with delicacy and humour in the lines ‘For love of you, the air, / my heart / and my hat hurt me’. Frost’s print captures an equivalent intensity and lightness. Recalling this period of his life, Frost proclaimed his admiration for the poet, saying, ‘Lorca is so simple, and so direct, and so full of colour and ideas. I was so much in love with the poetry at that time’
© The estate of Sir Terry Frost

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-anni-albers-artist

Albers

revered experimentation. During her early days studying under

Paul Klee

at the

Bauhaus

school, in the 1920s, she set out to expand the scope of weaving by using new, daring methods and materials. “I heard [Klee] speak and he said take a line for a walk,” she once recalled to Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. “And I thought, ‘I will take thread everywhere I can.’”

In her textile practice, Albers ecstatically mingled organic and synthetic fibers; loom-weaving and hand-weaving; representation and abstraction; art and utility. The resulting lively, bristling compositions revolutionized weaving and helped shape the burgeoning traditions of abstraction.

Albers also advocated for artistic experimentation in her role as a teacher, both at the Bauhaus and, later, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. To stimulate the creative process of her students, she’d ask them “to imagine that it was the 10th century, and they were on the coast of Peru,” she once told Fox Weber. In her view, the materials that washed up on beaches—seaweed, sand, branches, shells, even fish skeletons—could spark ideas for inventive weavings and unique abstract compositions.

After Albers died in 1994, she left behind writings, lectures, and interviews rife with ideas on how to stoke and sustain creativity. Below, we extract advice from the innovative, endlessly curious 20th-century artist’s theories.

Lesson #1: Embrace accidents

Unfortunately, the school was not as gender-equal as advertised; at the time, women were only allowed to study textiles, pottery, and bookbinding. She reluctantly chose weaving: “My beginning was far from what I had hoped for: fate put into my hands limp threads! Threads to build a future?” she recalled to Fox Weber. Ever resourceful, Albers soon enthusiastically embraced the medium. “Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over,” she wrote in a 1982 essay, “Material as Metaphor.” “I learned to listen to them and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.”

Albers became a deft and inventive weaver, advocating for the power of accidents in the creative process. “How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? ‘Accidentally,’” she wrote in the same essay. “Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed.”

As Albers told her students, she believed that accepting accidents could lead to an unexpected, new direction for an artwork, and could open new avenues of artistic thought. “Students worry about choosing their way,” she continued. “I always tell them, ‘you can go anywhere from anywhere.’” Both accident and its cousin, improvisation, spurred innovation in Albers’s own textiles, too. “Improvised weavings…provided a fund of means from which later clearly ordered compositions were developed, textiles of a quite unusual kind,” she wrote in a 1938 essay, “Weaving at the Bauhaus,” of her early days at the school, when she began to develop her practice of irregular geometric abstraction. “A new style started on its way.”

Lesson #2: Bring play into the artmaking process

Albers also celebrated the role of play in the creative process. She believed that a spontaneous and experimental approach to hues, patterns, and materials inspired meaningful work. In a 1941 article, “Handweaving Today: Textile work at Black Mountain College,” she proposed that artists start works with “a playful beginning, unresponsive to any demand of usefulness, an enjoyment of colors, forms, surface contrasts and harmonies—a tactile sensuousness.”

In the environment of the Bauhaus, Albers recalled, “uninhibited play with materials resulted in amazing objects, striking in their newness of conception in regard to use of color and compositional elements.” This method, in which all mediums and processes were game, was especially valuable to beginners who were developing their own aesthetic. Albers believed it also built self-confidence in young artists: “Courage is an important factor in any creative effort,” she wrote in “Weaving at the Bauhaus.” “It can be most active when knowledge in too early a stage does not narrow the vision.”

In her own practice, Albers embraced play through injecting spontaneity and creativity into the highly technical process of weaving, where the loom dictated many aesthetic decisions. She experimented with unorthodox metal threads, for instance, and often improvised shapes and compositions as she wove, rather than religiously following a pattern. Albers even nodded directly to her reverence of play in the title of one work, Play of Squares (1955). The textile shows a labyrinth of white and deep-brown squares, organized seemingly haphazardly—without a predictable, overarching formula. Scholar Virginia Gardner Troy pointed out in a 1999 essay that the piece “evokes an ambiguous arrangement of words and letters (a play of words) or of musical notes (a play of sounds).” The spirit of playfulness also led Albers to experiment with other mediums, like

, where she fashioned imaginative wearable art from everyday objects like bottle caps, strainers, and paperclips.

Albers also saw playfulness in the work of her artist heroes. In her famous instructional book On Weaving (1965), she described the textiles made by Peruvian weavers (whom she referred to as her “greatest teachers”) as “infinite phantasy within the world of threads, conveying strength or playfulness, mystery or the reality of their surroundings, endlessly varied in presentation and construction, even though bound to a code of basic concepts.”

Lesson #3: Listen to your chosen material

Albers felt strongly that textiles should reveal, rather than obscure, their structure. As Fox Weber pointed out in a 2017 essay, “she designed and executed her work according to the belief that fibers and their interlocking should be appreciated in their raw state.” Indeed, the geometric shapes and undulating lines that surge through Albers’s woven compositions reflect the weft and warp of the weaving process, and highlight the texture of the varied, knotty threads.

Essential to her approach was a respect for raw materials, and Albers continually encouraged her students to “listen” to whatever substance they’d chosen to work with. “To restore to the designer the experience of direct experience of a medium, is, I think, the task today,” she mused in the 1947 essay “Design Anonymous and Timeless.” “It means taking, for instance, the working material into the hand, learning by working it of its obedience and its resistance, its potency and its weakness, its charm and dullness.” In other words, extensive time should be spent getting to know your material: touching it, considering it, and understanding its properties so that it can be used creatively and to its full potential.

“The material itself is full of suggestions for its use if we approach it unaggressively, receptively,” Albers continued. “It is a source of unending stimulation and advises us in most unexpected manner.” Later, in her 1982 essay “Material as Metaphor,” she connected the act of listening to artistic innovation and success. “The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become,” she wrote. “Not listening to it ends in failure.”

For Albers, close observation and use of raw materials would also help her work stand the test of time. “The more we avoid standing in the way of the material and in the way of tools and machines,” she wrote in “Design Anonymous and Timeless,” “the better chance there is that our work will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old fashioned some day instead of antique.”

Lesson #4: Experiment with new technologies

Albers also advocated for the use of new machines and technologies—as long as respect for raw materials was maintained. “Not only the materials themselves which we come to know in a craft, are our teachers,” she advised in “Design Anonymous and Timeless.” “The tools, or the more mechanized tools, our machines, are our guides, too.”

It’s through new technologies (like a machine loom as opposed to a hand loom or foot-powered loom, for instance) that one can learn more about a material, and therefore expand its use and experiment with it in new ways. “We learn from them of the interaction of material and its use,” Albers continued, “how a material can change its character when used in a certain construction and how in turn the construction is affected by the material, how we can support the characteristics of material or suppress them, depending on the form of construction we use.”

Albers applied this concept to all mediums: “In architecture this may mean the difference of roman and gothic style, in weaving the same difference on a minute scale, the difference of satin and taffeta—the same material in different construction,” she wrote.

Embracing new technologies was another instance of Albers’s endless hunger for artistic experimentation, which drove both her deeply influential practice and her teachings.

Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, Lambe Creek, Cornwall, (1937)

In 1937, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst met at a dinner party. The scene is not hard to imagine – a 47 year old artist meets a charming 19 year old fan who is itching to rebel against convention. The attraction was immediate and Leonora defied her parents and ran away from her home to travel with Max back to France where he broke from his second wife and the two set up house together surrounded by other surrealists, spending their days painting canvases of each other and discussing art with the likes of Picasso, Duchamp, and Miró.

Stories of Leonora have her showing up naked to a party and serving her guests ‘hair omelettes’ made with chunks of their own hair that she had cut off the night before.

Stories differ about what happened next. Some sources say that Ernst was interned by French authorities in 1940 because he was German and therefore an ‘undesirable alien’ in France. Others say that he was detained by the Gestapo after Germany invaded France because they felt his art was ‘degenerate’. Some say that he was arrested both times.

We do know he escaped arrest with the help of American art patron Peggy Guggenheim. They arrived in America together and were married in 1941, leaving Leonora alone in France.

She was devastated. Not knowing what to do, she sold the house for a few francs, set her pet eagle free, and travelled in a friend’s Fiat to Spain where anxiety, delusions and a likely eating disorder culminated in a massive breakdown at the British Embassy in Madrid.

She was committed to a psychiatric hospital where she endured electroshock therapy and experimental drugs. This was a dark time for Leonora and images from this period are reflected in her work late into her life.

The story would have ended there if Leonora hadn’t had such an unbreakable spirit. Her father had arranged for a business colleague to accompany Leonora to a sanatorium in South Africa. Leonora escaped from her minders, hailed a taxi and directed it to the Mexican Embassy where her friend through Picasso, Renato LeDuc, worked as ambassador.

Renato married Leonora to shelter her with diplomatic immunity and together they travelled to Mexico. This was the beginning of Leonora’s life as an important figure in history as an artist, writer and founding force behind the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico.

“Great artists don’t just happen, any more than writers, or singers, or other creators,” O’Keeffe said. “They have to be trained, and in the hard school of experience.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001323q

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/03/food-dye-as-paint-hair-as-a-brush-how-a-lifer-found-an-escape-in-art?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Just watched a documentary about this man. Extraordinary both his writings and his art. Being in solitary confinement for over 20years opened his inner eye. . . . . . Now he is in a general prison he can’t find the inner solitude he needs to paint .. . . . .. . I love that he uses skittles for his paint, and embeds apple pips in some of his paintings to signify growth and birth. . . . . . Anyway enough ramblings. . . Link above

Warning: the following may trigger thoughts of suicide.
Karter Laskowski’s photo ‘The Moment’ explores thoughts of suicide and living with bipolar.
In Karter’s words:
This photo: ‘represents all the moments that let up to the moment before I made an attempt on my life. It is all of the feelings and thoughts that led up to an extremely intense moment and decision. The highs are nothing compared to the lows when living with bipolar depression. This is one moment in a life long battle.’

https://fb.watch/cXAwq6HfoG/

“I would much rather be old, [in] old age so much is open to us and the older you get, the less you give a flying whatever about what other people think” Sue Kreitzman is an outsider artist who has spent her life challenging the conventions of art and what it means to be a woman. Let’s learn more about her story
Sue Kreitzman

Don’t you just love it when you find a new artist that totally speaks to you? Ruby Neri and her colorful and oversized female vessels. Aged 50, Neri works in L.A. creating oversized sculptures of the female form ranging from 400-800lbs, while still maintaining the graffiti aesthetic she started her career with by spray painting on underglaze.
At first glance, viewers may think of the nude sculptures as being depictions of hypersexualized women. Some dance; some smoke cigarettes; some pose nude wearing nothing but the outline of spray painted high heels. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Neri countered this argument, stating instead that her female forms are representational of the various facets of being a woman, including Neri’s own identities of being “a mother, lover, daughter, and maker.” The fact that Neri is creating these women in the form of a vessel is charged in itself; throughout history the vessel has been seen as a feminine and passive container, while also bearing the shape of the female form. Neri reconfigures her vessels to show a more holistic view of the female experience, with emphasis on femininity and gendered ties to nature (many of her works show nude women standing among flowers).

Bohemian “It Girl” of Paris, master of surrealist disguise and generally a badass female libertine, Leonor Fini was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century. And yet barely anyone knows her name, even in Paris, where she once ruled the bohemian Parisian art world, considered one of the few women to break into the French male-dominated surrealist movement.
A feminist before her time and fiercely independent, Fini paved her own path. She was happy to be an outsider. Besides being a talented painter and a muse to so many of her surrealist peers, she also designed for the fashion world and created elaborate sets for the theatre and opera.
Openly bisexual and anti-marriage, she once said:
“Marriage never appealed to me, I’ve never lived with one person. Since I was 18, I’ve always preferred to live in a sort of community – A big house with my atelier (artist studio) and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend. And it has always worked.”
Until her death in 1996 she lived in her Parisian apartment with her two lovers and beloved seventeen Persian cats, who shared her bed and, at mealtimes, were allowed to roam the dining-table selecting tasty morsels (the cats, that is).
In her final years however, Fini’s stock had fallen so much that the French government refused to accept her paintings in lieu of back taxes owed by her estate. In a world that had wanted to maintain that creativity is a male attribute, Leonor Fini and her art had fallen into obscurity.
The Art Dealers Association of America called her “…the most undervalued artist of the 20th Century”.
So I think it’s time to rescue this forgotten Parisian “Frida Kahlo” from obscurity. Let’s get familiar if you’re not already, with the legacy and art of a lost bohemian queen of the Paris art world…
I’m not a huge surrealist art fan but the women who created it are always so awesome, fierce and unique.

https://www.frieze.com/article/utopian-eroticism-essay-2021?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=article&fbclid=IwAR0Ob7siEabsfS16Z0pDtP0ZShrboV3yeKyAiQulVTd7b3KgAuBdBhVdZeQ

Paris, 1966. Nicola L. (then Nicola) exhibited *The Screen for Three People: Homage to Alberto Greco* (1964–66), the first of her ‘Penetrable’ works. These encouraged participants to incorporate their bodies into the artwork. Comprising three stretched, white, rectangular canvases, the piece was designed to enable individuals to push their heads, arms and legs through various openings, their limbs protruding through the taut fabric, as if they were wearing the painting like a second skin. The initial inspiration for the work came from a spiritual experience Nicola L. had on the beach in Ibiza in 1964, when she felt that she and her supine seaside companions were inhabiting one body, that they were an extension of the sky and sand, fused to the wider landscape. *The Screen for Three People* was the first work she made following the suicide of her friend, the Argentine artist Alberto Greco. He had tenaciously challenged her interest in painting as retrograde, and so she had burnt all of her work in an impassioned rejection of the medium, initiating this new approach.
It was the critic Pierre Restany who had coined the term ‘Penetrable’, in reference to the way the works provoked this form of interior participation. Inhabitable artworks were clearly of the zeitgeist in 1966: Niki de Saint Phalle’s *Hon – en katedral* (She – a Cathedral) – a collaboration with her partner, the sculptor and fellow nouveau réalist Jean Tinguely, and artist Per Olof Ultvedt – was installed the same year at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Within the monumental construction of a brightly coloured, reclining, pregnant figure – positioned as if giving birth: on her back, knees raised and heels planted – was an amusement park, with its vaginal entrance located between her spread legs. Inside, the hollow limbs, breasts and belly housed a land of plenty, including a bar, a goldfish pond, a cinema, a vending machine with sandwiches, a bottle crusher and a telephone booth. The sculpture’s carnivalesque excess was suggestive of the hyperbolic and irreverent female grotesque. In a state of perpetual flux, *Hon* welcomed and expelled more than 100,000 museum visitor

Danielle Jacqui was born in 1934 in Nice, to a jeweler father and a militant communist mother.
The early 1970s were a founding period for Jacqui. She met Claude Leclercq, her second husband, who became a close companion in her artistic career until his death in 2000.
Established in Pont de l’Etoile in her somewhat surprising home, which serves as studio, museum and living space, Jacqui, painter and ceramic artist arouses everyone’s curiosity.
Brightly colored ceramics, sculptures, self-portraits, mosaics, embroidery, bas-relief dolls and animals… Her many creations invade every room of her house, from the kitchen to living room, and even cover the facade. Here, the place is jam-packed with every square meter crammed with one of her sculptures. Open to the public, the home of Danielle Jacqui (known locally as “celle qui peint” – “she who paints”) offers visitors a unique and intriguing journey.
. . . . I could go on but I shall spare you

Alice Neel, one of the great portraitists of the 20th century, made starkly honest paintings of relatives, lovers, friends, and neighbors. https://bit.ly/3xHlFRy

With Mother Tongue, Camille Henrot Calls for Change

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-radical-legacy-hannah-hoch-one-female-dadaists?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial&fbclid=IwAR2RJ59RAMIKmaXEZ8fcZ3gfxavypAbFsErq6b98LElzN3k5AxsaA-LG8tM

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch, One of the Only Female Dadaists

Link to article above

Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment. While these creators called their movement by the nonsense word “

Dada

” (“DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing,” said artist

Francis Picabia

), their strange new artworks offered significant polemical ideas about gender, politics, and creativity during a particularly tumultuous era in Western history.

In Germany, most Dada artists working in photomontage were men—

George Grosz

Raoul Hausmann

(an Austrian émigré), and

Kurt Schwitters

, for example—and their art reflects it. One famous example of the medium, The Art Critic (1919–20) by Hausmann, offers a particularly masculine perspective. The work features a man in a suit, his clothing and head snipped from different sources. He wields a proportionally massive pencil, which points directly from his crotch to become a phallic symbol linking power, art, and manhood.

Giving My Art A Voice

Talking about it

I was pushed out of my comfort zone by my tutors suggesting I work with animation and my paintings. . . .. . I had gathered a group,of similar age goddesses during my work on the menopause, and the discussions we had over the internet inspired many of these pieces.

So the next step was working out how to animate my work and use the words I was finding that so many women wanted spoken, about how lonely and tough the transition can be. . . . ..

I released most of these experiments on Instagram and got some really positive feedback

A message I received on Instagram from a stranger but yet fellow crone

Made using bbc menopause information for speakers of a foreign language learning English

Exhibitions in last 18 Months

Entering art competitions can be a daunting experience – aside from choosing which works of art to include in your entry, and which details about your background to mention, and filling in the relevant forms, there’s also the knowledge that a stranger, someone you’ve never met, will be examining your work.

The fact of entering is a statement about yourself as an artist, your work, and what you want to do with it. It’s a declaration that you are a serious artist, and should be taken seriously. You don’t have to be a professional artist, necessarily – but entering a competition means that art, and creating art, is a vital part of your life, one you’re willing to put effort into developing.

There’s another advantage to entering competitions, one which is frequently under-appreciated. It forces you to re-evaluate your work, where it fits into genres, themes and mediums. By imagining how others, particularly strangers, would see your art, you can gain new insight into work that has become so familiar to you that you might have stopped seeing some of its aspects.

All this said I have been slack about entering exhIBITIons or getting my work seen over the last couple of years. This is part due to CoViD lockdowns, and precautionary measures, but also due to my caring role and my own mental health.

The joy of the internet has come to the rescue and I have taken part in a couple of online exhibitions.

Body Image in an Image-conscious world?

The John Byrne Award

The House of Smalls is an innovative gallery set in a dolls house. Set up during covid lockdowns. It’s curators run exhibitions over Instagram calling out for exhibits no bigger than 5x5cm. I was drawn in particular to enter the call out regarding the menopause and was very happy to have my piece exhibited .

I was also offered a solo show at The Glorious Art House in Exeter last summer. I was very concerned that I didn’t have enough work, but it seemed to fill the space and I was pleased to have feed back via the Exeter Living magazine and several sales.

Also through the power of the internet I was approached by two artists who wanted be to be part of an exhibition with them. The theme was to celebrate woman’s day and was to be titled UNBOWED. Due to it happening in Cornwall I was unable to be involved with the duration or invigilator of the show, but very much enjoyed the experience. Being interviewed by Radio Cornwall was an interesting way to first ever speak to my fellow artists.

Although I was unable to be present at the show it was nice when people contacted me via email,or Instagram, to discuss my work and the effect it had on them. I have come to realise the one thing I a, is a communicator. My history as a mental health nurse was communicating and my art is an extension of that. The fact that I can produce work that makes people feel heard is so,etching I shall always be proud of.

Another exhibition o was part of, and happy they chose one of my pieces as the poster.

Exhibitions

The art exhibition has had a long and complex history, evolving with the ever- changing demands of society while at the same time challenging those very demands. Exhibitions act as the catalyst of art and ideas to the public; they represent a way of displaying and contextualizing art that makes it relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences. The art exhibition, by its nature, holds a mirror up to society, reflecting its interests and concerns while at the same time challenging its ideologies and preconceptions. Keeping art relevant to society and to a diverse audience at any given point in history is one of the main goals of the art exhibition and one of the reasons it is so important to the history of art.
Art exhibitions hold a precarious yet steadfast role; they take on multiple identities. “Exhibitions are strategically located at the nexus where artists, their work, the arts institution, and many different publics intersect.”1 Ultimately associated with a larger institution, exhibitions can bear the tremendous responsibility of furthering the goals of that institution, whether that is bringing in viewership or revenue. But, their relative independence also allows that they serve as platforms for experimentation and challenging convention in search of new ideology that best suits the needs of a contemporary society.

I have been lucky enough to have some experience with a wonderful small art gallery in Exeter to put on and curate shows over the past couple of years. We decided to,run some group,shows as a reaction to travel restrictions during covid, and as an outlet for something positive during such difficult times. The reaction from public and artists was very positive.

Putting on shows required learning a lot of new skills in curation and admin. It needed a good method of gathering the required information and Images from artists to make decision on art included from an initial call out. The call out was managed via social media initially, and also via email as an artist bank was established over time. The social media call outs proved very successful,as the gallery has a large following. These call outs were also shared to various art groups around Devon .

When artists applied they were sent this email. With a link to an online form which captured all the required information, and also made it much easier when it came to creating labels for the art work when hanging the exhibition . . .. . .

Thank you so much for your interest in the first post-lockdown Glorious Gallery group exhibition (We will think of a better title for the show!)
I’m delighted to tell you that we’d love to include your work! Applications are now closed but please let other artists know that there will be many more exhibitions coming up very soon!
Please fill in the online form below to register. Each artist may submit a maximum of two pieces but we may make exceptions for small sets, eg triptychs, small sculptures etc (depending on size) Please get in touch if your work is larger than 1 metre square too
We request that a

ll work is delivered to The Glorious Art House, 120 Fore st, Exeter, EX4 3JQ from 21st-23rd July between 10am – 2pm

Payment of £10 per piece is required on drop off. We can email you a receipt for your records

All work must be framed and ready to hang (canvasses do not need to be framed) using D rings, cord or wire. The exhibition will be hung with great care by the team at The Glorious Art House

All work must be clearly marked on back with name of artist, title of piece and price. Please bear in mind when pricing that 20% commission will be taken on sales

There will be a Private View on the evening of 24th July which will sadly have to be socially distanced, managed by limiting the numbers in the gallery at one time. But there is a bar downstairs so there will be a good place to wait if the gallery is full!

Artwork can be paid for at the bar by cafe staff in cash only, as we keep it separate. But we are also happy to put you in touch with the purchaser so that they can pay you direct by BACS transfer, PayPal etc…

Collection day is Sunday 16th August between 10am and 3pm. Please ensure that you do pick up your work as storage space is very minimal at The Glorious!

Every care will be taken with your artwork but no responsibility can be accepted for loss or damage in transit or whilst in situ. Work should be fully insured by the artist.

Please direct any questions to Jenni in the first instance at splendidpears@icloud.com

Here is the link to the online form:

https://form.jotform.com/201921945009049

We look forward to seeing you and your work!

Very best wishes

This is the form creator we used. It is free for the first 50 and then it becomes a monthly cost which needs to be considered.

https://www.jotform.com/

Above are some photos taken of the various exhibitions I have co curated and organised .

It was interesting to note the different mood and times depending on the title of the exhibition. We did one called Summer Exhibition as a tongue in cheek alternative the the National Gallery in London’s annual event. Much of the work was bright and colourful. The exhibition we did asking for work people had created during the first lockdown, or as a reaction to COVID was much quieter and reflective.

The exhibition by young artists was possibly my favourite. Children have such a wonderful unblemished way of completing art and seeing the world

Hanging the work was always an interesting job. When you have very different work by lots of artists it can be difficult to make it appear a cohesive exhibition. We had a lot of conversations about how best to present the work, and usually laid it around the floor, until it became obvious where each piece belonged.

As it was during covid times that we put on these exhibitions we decided to also do a virtual exhibition using this software

https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/front

It was also useful as the gallery has stairs and so it meant that disabled people could access the gallery in some format.

Of course the most important part of any exhibition is to have an audience to engage with the art you have carefully curated. We advertised via various social media sites and the gallery itself already is well known in Exeter for its art, beautiful interiors and excellent coffee and cakes so there was plenty of footfall. Also the local magazine Exeter Living did several articles about the exhibitions.

Next post will be about the exhibitions I have taken part in and that experience.

My Favourite Art things to read, watch or listen to. . . . .

I love art, all art. I love knowing about artists and their lives and looking at how their experiences manifest themselves through their art. I love watching them at work. Hearing them talk and researching how other people respond to them.

I thought I would use this post to share some recent discoveries and not so recent. . . . ..

Firstly I love Chantal Joffe. I find the rawness of her work and her use of broad naked brush strokes really speaks to me. She is very personal and many of her pictures are of herself . . . She did a series of one a day portraits after the breakdown of her marriage, and it is amazing to watch her dip into a place of sadness and grief and emerge like a butterfly at the other end. . . . .also of her mum during times of illness, and her daughter.

About 18 months ago I managed to nip up to Bristol in between lockdowns and see her exhibition at the Arnolfini. I was smitten by her use of colour and lack of refinery that adds an added dimension to her paintings. Big slabs of colour and not a moment of self flattery.

This is a podcast that someone sent me a while ago which I listened to and then began my research into this artist Chantal Joffe. . . . .. I will share it here. ( I have many wonderful friends who share art podcasts or bbc radio shows with me and I am very grateful. They know me so well)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fgrg

Leonora Carrington, a surrealist painter who has always intrigued me. Her life story is incredible and she seems to have remained true and genuine despite everything that happened to her. I have to admit that surrealism isn’t generally the type of art I choose to follow or that I would want to love with. . . . . .but when you know the story behind these paintings you cannot help but be moved by them. . . . .this is another radio show sent to me by a friend. I find it beautiful, soothing and inspiring in equal measures . . . .. .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ykqh

Click above link for this beautiful listen

There is also a wonderful documentary that gives a greater insight into her life. Once I become intrigued by people or pieces of art my obsessive streak kicks in and I want to live in their world for a while

Next Tracey Emin a real marmite artist. She was one of the first contemporary artists to really speak to me. Her bed was the the first time I realised that other people felt like I do sometimes. It was a raw presentation of the reality of depression . Despite all the critics and non believers I will always love her for that piece and how it made me feel less alone. During lockdown she was due to have an exhibition with Eduard Munch at the Roual Academey, it became an online exhibition . I entered the virtual exhibition with trepidation as I was sure it would not be able to move me the same way as seeing paintings in person.

Tracey Emin has long had a fascination with the Norwegian Expressionist and painter of The Scream, Edvard Munch: in her words, “I’ve been in love with this man since I was eighteen” this exhibition married the two artists together wonderfully. . . .. I was surprised by how engrosssed I became and did feel like I was wandering an exhibition. I think this is a new piece of technology that came out of the pandemic but may continue to serve a purpose. Nothing beats seeing art in the flesh, but this is a good compromise, and may be a lifeline to people who are housebound. . . .

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/virtual-tour-tracey-emin-edvard-munch-video

The BBC doesnt seem to like me embedding links so,above is a link to the virtual exhibition if you would like to see it.

A little off piste with this one. It’s not this artist work per se that fascinates but rather his theology around making his work. He is,completely about understanding humans, what makes us tick, what makes us hurt, how are we broken, and how can art help.

By Interlocutor Magazine

“Everything I do now is in the spirit of giving back,” the artist David Choe says in The Choe Show, his uncategorizable limited series from FX and now streaming on Hulu. The program is a bouillabaisse stew of television: a mix of talk show, costumed role-playing therapy sessions, deeply personal confessionals, and performance art. Above all, it’s a wildly eclectic exercise in ecstatic compassion from one of contemporary art’s most polarizing and unpredictable figures.

If you are really brave and prepared to not judge me try watching this, too. I’m not going to make any comment and leave it to you to decide if this speaks to you or whether you,think I need mental health intervention for posting it here. Some things are better without words. . . .

I’m not sure if it will allow me to post that, but. . . . If you are fascinated enough search David Choe. . Release the hoisin on YouTube

So a small insight into some eclectic art delight that’s I love and go back to time and time again. I will add more in another post soon. . . . .l but I will finish with a podcast series that is a wonderful pick and mix to learn about women artists both those you may have heard off and those you haven’t .. . . .. podcasts are a wonderful,way,to be inspired

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/katy-hessel-podcast

Again it,won’t let me embed the link

but here is the front page to give some idea of the breadth and range of artists up for discussion.

I hope some of these programmes inspire you as much as they have

me. . . . I have so many I could share. Next some interesting articles I have recently read. . . .

Brenda Goodman’s Fearless Self-Portraits

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-lee-krasner-finally-appreciated-mrs-pollock?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial&fbclid=IwAR3053noZxv99jGRsuFTATQ5h2iqdKntdMvlcbQkqsIssBkY6ro5NtfFCr

https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/52306/1/nudes-how-artists-are-reframing-the-tradition-of-the-naked-body-art

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-kathe-kollwitzs-art-compassionate-subversive-politically-outspoken

I really will stop now. . . .until next time. . . . ..

The evolution of a painting

A painting doesn’t usually appear out of thin air, it comes about after a period of play and experimentation. Certainly for me this is the case. I thought I would use this blog to show some of my paintings and the various stages I went through before they became fully fledged birds ready to fly the nest.

Most people don’t realise the stages a canvas will go through before it is finished. Much of my work is all about layers and colour, but also the structure of any painting is very important. In some ways the artistic process can be seen as similar to scientific practice involving lots of tests and experiments. To help you see this process I will begin by showing the finished product. . . . .

This piece is one of my final pieces for my art degree. I used to think an art piece just arrived from the hands of only a very talented few, but I have learnt with time that you can fumble your way to art in a process of creating failed pieces and ugly pictures until you begin to see the direction you wish to take. My paintings rely a lot on emotion I can spend hours applying paint that will never be seen again destined to be buried under layers of other colour, and my composition will often change through the project, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let me show the beginnings of this style of painting.

I wanted to try and work with mixed media and some collage. I like the texture and depth it can give to work. So initially I just began to play with the idea of mixed media and using collage. All my work has a theme of the crone or empowering the older woman so I often incorporate a crown.

I discovered I liked the texture and layers and the exaggerated facial expressions. I wanted to make these women fun, strong and playful

At a similar time I was invited to be a patron of an online life drawing class run by an amazing couple with a background in performance, dance and drag. The energy was exactly what I was looking for and so I did a lot of experimental paintings from those classes.

Colour is also an important part of my work and I will often also do a lot of playing with colour, sometimes with my fingers, sometimes with brushes and other mark making tools. These are usually very abstract and really help me in choosing my palette for a collection. It is not necessarily done in a scientific or recorded fashion. I simply find I am using the same colours and combinations over and over again because they suit the mood of what I am trying to create .

So then we come on to how the piece itself evolves. I often start with an idea. In this instance these pieces were inspired by the energy vigour and joy of drag acts. I felt they showed the naughty humorous side that older women often feel is supposed to be hidden. My work attempts to empower older women to break out of the invisibility they often feel inflicted by society and misbehave and not give a flying duck , so many years of experience have shown that fun, laughter and joy fullness really are important in this sometimes difficult world. So let us look at the different phases these pieces went through. One of them appeared quite quickly, but the second one was more of a struggle. I couldn’t get the structure and composition that I wanted. It originally had three crones in it.

Many of the issues were about not being happy with the structure and composition. In the end two heads of similar size worked better for me and a more stylised crone to evoke humour.

The other painting came together more effortlessly as can be seen in this work in progress photos.

I hope this has helped to understand MY process and remember it is only my own process. Everybody has a different way of seeing, processing and understanding the world and as such their way of making art will also differ.

Jenni Watters artist has been exploring and playing with the ideas arising from inhabiting a “patriarchal image obsessed” society as a “fat menopausal woman”. She has begun to look at what is it that “we” are looking for as we progress through life, having perhaps achieved our career goals and seen our children flow the nest. Maybe this is the time we can begin to look inwardly and refine our core? She began to explore the idea of our inner child. . . . Is it this that has been allowed to run free again when we look at old ladies who dress in leopard skin, swear copiously and eat chocolate cake for breakfast?. Is this when the crone can rise again.

The works also show the power and knowledge that women gain as they travel through life. The experiences both good and bad are seen through the layers of the work. In ancient times older women were revered for their wisdom. In modern days older women often feel invisible. These works aim to redress that balance .

The beginning of art creation

This period has been all about research and experimentation. I have travelled through time looking at the history of the goddess all over the world, and how older women fitted in. There are many examples of older women as goddesses revered for their wisdom and matriarchal properties. I also looked at the history of witches and how the older woman became a figure of ridicule and fear through history.

The switch to a patriarchal system led by the church ensured the demise of the wise old woman. Crones became a derogatory term rather than respected. My art looked at older women and fighting to get back to a point of inclusion and respect.

I have looked at lots of art by women of my generation.

It is one area of culture where “the older woman”has begun to rise to the surface and have a voice. I am really interested in looking at what they use the voice to say. Whatever the theme it is of interest to see it from the female viewpoint rather than in the more frequently heard male voice.

Women have always had an acute awareness of growing old. In her acclaimed May 2015 essay “ The Insults of Age” (Garner, 2015)

explores the ways in which getting older means” being erased from a culture that equates youth and beauty and beauty with value – a cruel and thankless algebra. “Your face is lined, and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid,” she writes. “It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business.”

Cindy Sherman, Chantal Joffe , Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Paula Rego , Alice Neel are among the artists that influence me and my work. I am inspired by the raw truth and vulnerability in the work of both Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois, and the story telling of Paula Rego , Chantal Joffe and Alice Neel. Humour is an element that has often been present in my previous work and I hope the tongue in cheek not taking myself too seriously will continue with influence from Sarah Lucas and Cindy Sherman.

Sarah Lucas
Self Portrait with Fried Eggs
1996

In my next stage I hope to take these ideas to the next level. Maybe a larger scale sculpture piece reclaiming the goddess for the older woman. Incorporating both the original Crone theme and the golden goddess theme. To give back to “the older woman “ her joy, beauty and fearsome knowledge.

I have only just discovered Simone De Beauvoir . . . For me this quote sums up menopause in one sentence

“. . . . Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly” (Beauvoir, Borde, Malovany-Chevallier and Rowbotham, 2011)

I want to give older women their wings back with my work.

This is the perfect time for us to fly, to be able to do all the things we have ever wanted to do, to be our complete selves. Our wings being cut, means our femininity is squashed, held to ransom, we forget who we are. We begin to question ourselves and our intuition, we need to learn to trust in ourselves again when all the roles we thought defined us have disappeared.

Painting gives me joy and if possible some visual art will be part of my body of final work. The brush strokes and style is often raw and visceral like the work of Chantal Joffe and I wish to continue to experiment with oils. Bourgeois’ Femme Maison paintings scream that women are put upon, jailed, abused and patronised.

A recent Chantal Joffe inspired painting – The Dancing Queen

We blame ourselves for not being able to fly, how to cope with the ever changing rules that are it may seem the fault of our hormones. However it is not the hormones that hold us ransom but a society that has kept these secrets of change from us. Who expect us to “just get on with it” For too long women’s pain has been treated like a game. We are now, thanks to fledgling academic research, beginning to understand that it’s far less likely to be believed and treated than men’s – even if we’re some way off solving the problem. Artists such as Tracey Emin shine a light on how many women are still dismissed as irrational, over-emotional and, that classic, hormonal when it comes to our health.

Women have just got on with it for years, but we cannot fly without our wings. I would like my art to help regrow those wings. To provide a coming together and sharing of knowledge that allows women to age and watch us fly. Part of my project hopes to engage with other women coming of age (menopausal) and share our struggles and experiences. To be able to personalise my art with the words of others.

Working on creating the new goddess icon for today’s women. Full of pathos, humour and understanding maybe I have been influenced by Anthony Gormley’s army and would like to recreate an army of menopausal women standing together ready to fly.

The witch has become a negative term for older women for too long and for so many reasons. Even today Mary Beard tells of being trolled on Twitter for being a witch because she is an older woman with wisdom. This is an affective tool to quieten women to prevent them from feeling able to share their thoughts, knowledge and wisdom. This piece of art will attempt to address this issue.

Why make art at all? Recently I came across the bed by Tracey Emin unexpectedly. It still has the ability to stop me in my tracks. A piece that has been viriled and ridiculed by many but for me it was the first ever piece of art that touched my soul. I looked at it and realised other people understood and knew depression. . . I mean really really understood. I in fact cried. Suddenly I wasn’t so alone. If any piece of my art can ever communicate understanding and deep connection to even 1% of the effect that piece had on me then I will feel that I have achieved my goal.

References

Beauvoir, S., Borde, C., Malovany-Chevallier, S. and Rowbotham, S., 2011. The Second Sex. London: Vintage Books.

Garner, H., 2015. The insults of age | Helen Garner. [online] The Monthly. Available at: <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/may/1430402400/helen-garner/insults-age> [Accessed 12 February 2021].

Final round up

I have looked at lots of art by women of my generation . . . It is one area of culture where “the older woman”has begun to rise to the surface and have a voice. I am really interested in looking at what they use the voice to say. Whatever the theme it is of interest to see it from the female viewpoint rather than in the more frequently heard male voice.

Cindy Sherman, Chantal Joffe , Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Paula Rego , Alice Neel are among the artists that influence me and my work.

In this last stage of this project I found it difficult to keep my energy and enthusiasm towards my art. Personal circumstances interfered and for the first time since I discovered art, I no longer found it my comfort. Art has always been my go to self soother in times of anxiety, and it was a surprise when it no longer worked for me. I reverted to my favourite medium of painting and attempted to recreate the free and open nature of Chantal Joffe in some paintings .

Sunbathing goddess is a work in acrylics, and dancing queen in oils

Much of my experimenting for this project have been sculptural. I discovered plaster as a new medium and mixed with clay and expanding foam have been pleased with the results. I found a product to add aged copper to the pieces and finished off my recent pieces. . . The inner child, and reinvented goddess with this metal effect.

In my next stage I hope to take these ideas to the next level. Maybe a larger scale sculpture piece reclaiming the goddess for the older woman. Incorporating both the original Cron theme and the golden goddess theme. To give back to “the older woman “ her joy, beauty and fearsome knowledge.

I have only just discovered Simone De Beauvoir . . . For me this quote sums up menopause in one sentence

“. . . . Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly” (Beauvoir, 1949)

I want to give older women their wings back with my work.