What do these three artists have in common? That as they became aged and aging artists they became much more interested in paint and its physicality, sometimes to the point of obscuring what they were depicting.

See this article from Prospect Magazine entitled The Skin We Live In by Sebastian Smee. He says as follows:  ”In the 1990s and 2000s, he takes this still further, introducing layers of painted reinforcement. A spiky quality that goes beyond mere representation appears in many of his best pictures. As with late Rembrandt, the paint is applied in ways that disrupt or interfere with the viewer’s easy access to the image. Something extra is conveyed—an awkwardness, but also a sense of deepening interest, thickening emotion, urgency.”

posted by Nancy Charak

Avoid These Pay to Play Art Galleries & Venues

posted by Nancy Charak

I received an email via my website contact page from a student from Belgium who for her course of Latin has to talk about an artwork about Dido & Aeneas. She asked me the following several questions:

• I would like to learn more about your series.
• You say that the paintings represent the feeling of Aeneas when he’s leaving the city.
• What is then the difference between each painting of the serie?
• Why did you chose the topic of Dido and Aeneas?
• What’s your vision on the topic of DIdo and Aeneas?
• Is there something symbolic in the paintings?

I answered her questions this way:

Thank you very much for looking at and enjoying my work.

I have done some reading, in English, of the classics because they are great stories with universal impact.

Dido’s story is a woman’s struggle; at Tyre her brother kills her husband, she escapes to Carthage, founds the city, cleverly lays out its walls, builds a home for her people and is judged to be a wise ruler.

So even though the Aeneid is the story of the founding myth of Rome and thus of Aeneas’ wanderings, at its heart is Dido’s lament and the pyre she builds to immolate herself.

Stanley Lombardo’s translation, in Book 4, at lines 689-708:

“O God!” she said. “Will he get away,

Will this interloper make a mockery of us?

To arms, the whole city after him!

Launch the fleet! Bring fire, man the oars!

What am I saying? Where am I?

What has come over me? Oh, Dido, only now

Do you feel your guilt? Better to have felt it

When you gave away your crown. Behold

The pledge, the loyalty of the man they say

Bears his ancestral gods, bore on his shoulders

His age-worn father! Could I not have torn him

Limb from limb and fed him to the fishes?

Murdered his friends? Minced Ascanius himself

And served him up as a meal to his father?

The battle could have gone either way: What of it?

Doomed to die, whom did I have to fear?

I should have torched his camp with my own hands,

And thrown myself on top of the conflagration.

So, I see these images and the story, as not so much of Trojan Aeneas’ journey to Rome and glory as the founder of a successful patriarchal dynasty, but more of Dido’s lament and her funeral pyre. She immolated herself out of deep regret, guilt at giving herself to his ambitions, and the realization that she’d let down her people.

Is there a difference between each painting of the series? There basically is no difference between the paintings, they are variations on a theme.

You ask is there something symbolic in the paintings? If there’s any overt symbolism is the bits of red paint scattered into the black. Could be that red is the fire and black is the soot and ashes. I prefer not to overstate symbolism in my work, but let the viewer do their own thinking.

Once again, thank you ever so much for looking at my work, enjoying it, and for giving me the opportunity to do some thinking and explication of it. Hopefully, this makes sense to you.

I wish you continued success in your studies.

posted by Nancy Charak

Nice, very nice, my work and the work of these other fine artists juried into Woman Made Gallery’s Bare Essentials Minimalism in the 21st Century, by Ingrid Fassbender.

Note that I have made bold not only my name in the list but my fellow exhibitors in the “Marks In Time” group. We exhibit together as a three-fer, email us at marksintime@gmail.com

Bare Essentials: Minimalism in the 21st Century

posted by Nancy Charak

I want to dive into this one. Who is the greatest visual artist ever and why? I invite artists and thinkers to offer up their opinions on this.

My nominee is Goya.

It is a much overused trope, especially in this modern era of the artists’ statement, that art is about truth. Goya tells the truth about war, disaster and misery, to which he had a front seat.

“Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, a series of eighty prints depicting the consequences of the nineteenth-century Spanish War for Independence are unbearable, but they are not meant to simply document atrocities. The real paradox of horrors transformed into painting or sculpture or print is that art does not let the savagery have the last word.”  —Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a writer and activist who contributes occasional essays on art and society to the New Haven Advocate.

Goya started his art career by making “cartoons” for tapestries that depicted idyllic happy dancing scenes. After the images were converted to fabric, the oil paintings were rolled up and set aside. All this to our benefit as those paintings now grace the Prado.

Goya became a court painter to the Hapsburgs that ruled Spain, managing to depict them despite their pendulous jaws and unhandsome looks with some flattery. He also made devotional paintings that grace cathedrals in Spain.

Events in Spain, however, gave him a front row seat on horror and treachery. The Hapsburgs were lured out of Spain to France by Napoleon Bonaparte, who then installed his brother Joseph on the throne. An uprising by common Spaniards ensued with horrible massacres by mercenaries loyal to France. A monstrous civil war ensued. Eventually, the Spanish patriots succeeded, the Hapsburgs and the church prelates came back to rule Spain with an even harsher hand, giving no gratitude to the populists for saving the country. The argument can be made, not really germane to this discussion of Goya, that stable government did not exist in Spain until after the death of Franco (1975).

To sum it up, Goya’s career spanned the 19th century, he moved from the depiction of idyllic country scenes, flattering royal portraits, devotional paintings, the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, ending with the Black Paintings.

As survivors of the hapless 20th century, after Auschwitz, Dachau, Cambodia, Somalia, Goya tells us about our darkest, deepest human selves.

posted by Nancy Charak

I took myself to the Art Institute of Chicago the other day. I have a usual path that I take, prints and drawings, then American paintings, then the modern wing. This means that I walk past China, Japan and quickstep through South Asian art in the railroad bridge to get to what I am in a hurry to see. However, finding myself in the place last week and having seen prints, drawings, American, modern several times this summer, I decided that I would go to China and Japan.br /Part of the reason I would seemingly rush past is that the Art Institute puts the older more traditional art at the front of the gallery. Thus I almost missed this amazing bamboo basket. To call this a basket is potentially a serious mistake, it’s a sculpture, it’s an amazing piece of art.

Knot, 2007, by Homma Hideaki

Furthermore, it’s a mistake on my part to assume that if it’s old it’s boring. This is one of my favoritest pieces in the China exhibit. It’s a clay model of a pigsty and latrine from the Han dynasty era. It is about 12″x12″by 8″, in the center is a sow suckling her piglets.

Han Dynasty

Lesson, slow down, look.

posted by Nancy Charak

Cri de Coeur 5951, © Nancy Charak, 2010, watercolor, prismacolor pencil on unfinished fabricated birchwood panel, 18”x24”

I can honestly say that there’s a very real sense in which I have never not known about Helen Frankenthaler and her work. My mother was a great admirer of Helen’s art, returned from a vacation in New York gushing about what she had seen when I was still in grammar school. To my sorrow that catalogue has disappeared. A good friend from junior and senior high school had Frankenthaler’s work in her house, along with Picassos and Kandinskys.

Tales of Genii III, Helen Frankenthaler, 1998, fifty-three-color woodcut from 18 woodblocks (17 maple, 1 mahogany) and 2 stencils on gray TGL handmade paper,” 47x42” (119.4x106.7cm), Edition 36, Artist’s proofs 14.

I choose Helen Frankenthaler because she is the head of a pantheon of abstract expressionists; to name a few, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Vija Celmins and Katherina Grosse. Purity of thought and action on the canvas emanate from Frankenthaler’s work, even if that work is a 53 color woodcut.

The Frankenthaler woodcuts astonish because they continue her pattern of breaking rules and ignoring conventional modes of working art media. She is widely credited with being the first to work with unprimed canvases, allowing oil paint to halo and stain, and in so doing, to influence a number of artists, Jules Olitski and Sam Francis as foremost examples.

Helen Frankenthaler is my lodestar. I keep two quotes from her displayed in my studio, “A really good picture looks as if it’s happened all at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work when a picture looks labored and you can read in it—well she did this, and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me.”[1]

In the description of the exhibit of the woodcuts at the National Gallery of Australia’s website, she is quoted, “There are no rules, that is one thing I say about every medium, every picture. . .that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about.” [2] [1]Ibid
[2] http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Frankenthaler/

posted by Nancy Charak

A stroll through the Neues Museum and the Pergamon in Berlin, April 2011.

Berlin Museums

posted by Nancy Charak

April in Paris at the L’Orangerie, what could be better?

Monet Water Lilies Orangerie

posted by Nancy Charak

Two of the greatest technological revolutions in the history of the world go largely unheralded, the flour mill powered by electricity and the washing machine also powered by electricity. No other inventions have done more to liberate women, with the possible exception of the birth control pill. And I might add, we’re not going back, no woman I know yearns to get back on her hands and knees and grind corn for five hours a day to feed just five other people, and no woman I know wants to stand over a washtub with a washboard ever again.

“Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.”

posted by Nancy Charak