Alex Alvis Art

Thursday, November 6, 2014

The Troubles and Rita Donagh

The group of artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007 has been the subject of this blog for quite some time. There were so many artists included in the show, I can't imagine they were discussed at much length in the show itself and so I thought it would be educational to learn more about them.

And it has. The artist who is the subject of this blog today, Rita Donagh, is a bit of a mystery to me though. I can't figure out why she was in a feminist show, particularly. Maybe if you know why she might have been included, other than because she was a woman, you could comment on that below.

The majority of her art was inspired by the Northern Ireland Conflict, euphemistically called the Troubles, that started in the 1960's and didn't "end" until the 1990's.

©Rita Donagh - Counterpane

I appreciate art that addresses the history of war. This is because of how were are led to know and remember things. I believe that events in time, before history is born, are remembered differently by anyone present; remembrance is colored of course by opinion, level of involvement, the coping mechanisms of the person, and so much more.

©Rita Donagh - Single Cell Block

Especially when a collective of humans are exposed to the atrocities of war...which in this case is still being called "Conflict", the facts human kind does not wish to remember (because of shame and/or fear of a tarnished legacy ...or whatever) are subverted, rewritten or ignored.

©Rita Donagh - Shadow of the Six Counties

There are artists who document memory before events are transformed and appropriated into "a history." Rita Donagh is one such artist. She is of Irish descent and was in her 20's when the Troubles began.

U.K. blogger, Eirene, on her blog A Place Called Space visited the Hugh Lane City Art Gallery in Dublin in 2013 and saw Rita Donagh's work there. The following is a photo from her blog and her description of this work:

©Rita Donagh - Bystander

"The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s provide the context for Donagh's Bystander. This work is part of a series she made under the general title Disturbance. In this painting Donagh's depiction of Ireland is that of a country that has been stunned by an excess of death, grief, repression and fear. Northern Ireland has become a strangely glacial region where universal whiteness descends threatening to extinguish everything in sight. Two press photographs, modest in their proportions, testify to events in the region. The one on the top left hand side is a newspaper photograph of children playing in an urban wasteland surrounded by dereliction. The second one is of a woman who was killed, caught in the middle of an urban battle: there were no blankets left to cover her body with, as so many had been killed, so her body was covered with newspapers. The rest of the canvas is abstract, large areas where oil and pencil are used - a horizontal bar near the base of the picture contributes to a feeling of constriction. There are areas of murky grey at the top of the painting, evoking an overcast sky and diagonal lines lash through the composition reminiscent of wind-driven rain. This is a painting about violence and loss and it's incredibly powerful."

That is all I have for today. I hope you make time for incredible creativity and follow what ever it is that exists in your heart for the making.

I also want to thank all of the readers of my blog. As of today there have been over 4,000 page views of my 120 posts to date. Thank you.

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Jay Defreo's Rose

Jay DeFreo is best known for her monumental painting (12' high and weighing close to a ton) called "The Rose."

For eight years it was pretty much all she worked on at an apartment in San Francisco she shared with her husband. She loved to entertain and share her life with the other Beat Scene artists of the time and the legend of the painting travelled to the east coast and her work was included in a show curated by Dorothy Miller in 1959 called "Sixteen Americans."

DeFreo did not attend the show and neither did her monumental painting which eventually had to be removed from the apartment along with part of an exterior wall - by a crane - when a rent increase meant eviction for the artist and her husband, Wally Hedrick.

Jay DeFreo working on The Rose in San Francisco
by Jerry Burchard

No longer able to work on the painting, a work that both created her legacy but at the time caused the momentum of her art career to stall. Depression followed a lifestyle that was immersed in this obsession with one work and a whole lot of partying. She and her husband divorced and she didn't create art at all for the next four years.

The Rose eventually ended up in a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute (eventually covered by a false wall) to later be removed and restored after her death from lung cancer in 1989.

Last year there was a retrospective of her work at The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Jay DeFreo's The Rose at The Whitney Museum of Modern Art
photo by Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

Here is a short film about the retrospective:

Much of her artwork is held in The Jay DeFeo Trust which she set up before her death. This site shows photos of much of her work over the years; many of the photos she created in the 1970's; The Loop Series, Tripod Series, Shoetree Series, Compass Series, and some of her paintings from the 70's, Lotus Eater and Cabbage Rose. And her work in the 1980's; Eternal Triangle, Summer Landscape, Impressions of Africa, Samurai, La Brea, Mirage, Blue Nile and Black Canyon... and more.

She created for herself and for no one else and I love the authenticity of it.

Tomorrow I'll be talking about British artist, Rita Donagh.

I hope you are enjoying your day.

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Niki De Saint Phalle

A group of artists is next on the list of artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007, included in the show undoubtedly because of their work "She A Cathedral," or "Hon-en katedral" otherwise known as "Hon" for short. They are Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt.

I don't know. I'm sure a lot of people may find it shocking. I may be one of them. Here is a schematic of it and an installation view.

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Hon en Katedral

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Hon (schematic drawing)

Perhaps it's my Midwestern conservative upbringing and the fact that there's no head...

Overall though, I like Niki's work. She loved Gaudi, as do I and she did a lot of Gaudi-esk work. Here are more photos. I haven't the time today to write any more, but now you know who Niki de Saint Phalle is, if you never heard of her or her work before. How fun is that? More art history - I love it!

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Grotto

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Tarot Garden

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Serpent Tree

©Niki De Saint Phalle - Noah's Ark Sculpture Park

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Inspiration Sunday

Welcome to another Inspiration Sunday, the first Sunday in November. If you are in the U.S. (I think Arizona does not do daylight savings time...) did you remember to turn your clocks back last night?

"I believe in listening to cycles. I listen by not forcing. If I am in a dead working period, I wait, though these periods are hard to deal with. I'll be content if I get started again..." ~Lee Krasner

©Lee Crasner - Gaea

"I love making art...It's largely how I see myself. I'm an artist, therefore I have to make art." ~Chuck Close

Courtesy Sienna Shields © Chuck Close, courtesy Pace Gallery

"I'll take weeks out doing drawings, watercolor studies, I may never use. I'll throw them in a backroom, never look at them again or drop them on the floor and walk over them. But I feel that the communion that has seeped into the subconscious will eventually come out in the final picture." ~Andrew Wyeth

©Andrew Wyeth - Young Bull

"Here I am...happy, completely happy. I have had a wonderful day of painting. It is not that I have accomplished anything in particular, but it's the thought of all I could do that makes me almost crazy with joy." ~Paula Modersohn-Becker

©Paula Modersohn-Becker - A Sitzendes Maedchen mit
Verschraenkten Armen (A Sitting Maiden with Crossed Arms)

"I paint my own reality. I paint because I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration." ~Frida Kahlo

©Frida Kahlo - Roots

"To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream." ~Giorgio De Chirico

©Giorgio De Chirico - Metaphysical Interior with Sun which Dies

"The minute I sat in front of a canvas, I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do as I like in it." ~Alice Neel

©Alice Neel - Elenka

"I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself." ~Georgia O'Keefe

©Georgia O-Keefe - Rust Red Hills

"Art is the opposite of nature. A work of art can come only from the interior of man." ~Edvard Munch

©Edvard Munch - Shore With Red House

"First and foremost, artists should give up self pity and do their work. Despair and fear of failure must be fought against as the enemies of creativity." ~Donna Marxer

©Donna Marxer - Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue

Hope this helps inspire you to work like crazy this next week without regard for anything other than what is in your heart. Wishing you a very creatively blessed Sunday today and since tomorrow is Monday I may have time to blog...but I may not. Whichever is the case I wish you a good day tomorrow too!

~Alex

Saturday, November 1, 2014

I can See the Sea

Artist Iola de Freitas is our artist to talk about today, one of the artists included in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007. She is Brazilian and has travelled quite a long way, artistically, from where she started back in the 70's with photography.

Today, she is considered a site specific installation artist and a sculptor working primarily with stainless steel and pliable materials such as sheets of plastic.

Since she is Brazilian and not even the English version of Wikipedia has information on her, I have had some extra researching to do. There is a very cool video of her work with her narration on You Tube. But it is in Spanish with no subtitling. It's a visually amazing video all the same. If Spanish is one of the languages you know (or even if it isn't) you might want to check that out. There is also an interview about her on Artslant and the Gallery Raquel Arnaud site has an English version of it's page about Freitas and great photos of her works.

Rather than write about her I thought it would be fun to let her work speak for itself - arranged from the 70's to today. I love the forms and color and rhythm and organic shapes in her work today and the way it interacts with the light and flow of the environment and space the works occupy.

Photography 1973-1981

© Iole de Freitas - artist with reinstallation of work outside
Açude Museum in the Tijuda Forest, a mountainous hand-planted
rainforest in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil -
claimed to be the world's largest urban forest.

Untitled, ©Iole de Freitas, 2013 polycarbonate printing
Green and aluminum, 100m² x 4 m in height,
Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro

Hope you are enjoying this first day of November and your weekend and this little retrospective of the works of Iola de Freitas.

Tomorrow is Inspiration Sunday of course.

'Til then!

~Alex

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Moving Towards Equality

"I believe that gender is a cultural fiction, not a biological given. But while there have been many achievements in the last 20 years, racism and sexism are still rife. . . . Those things have to become detached. But until we are able to detach gender from the ways we are in the world, it’s important for us to move towards equality. Moving towards equality is what the word feminism means. Until we’ve achieved that, we can’t give up the word. Feminist design is an effort to bring the values of the domestic sphere into the public sphere; feminist design is about letting diverse voices be heard through caring, relational strategies of working and designing. Until social and economic inequalities are changed, I am going to call good design feminist design." ~Sheila Levrant de Bretteville (in an interview with Ellen Lupton, Eye Magazine, Issue 8, 1992)

I agree with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville that gender is a cultural fiction. A short way of saying that treating someone differently because of their gender has been invented by culture.

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Pink, 1973, installation photo by Brian Forrest
the at WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
Geffen Contemporary MOCA March 4-July 16, 2007

Just as treating anyone differently because of any perceived deviation from the "norm" is an invention of culture. There is no normal, there's just us. Why all the fuss?

Here is another quote from that interview:

"I will never, never, never forget to include people of colour, people of different points of view, people of both genders, people of different sexual preferences. It’s just not possible any more to move without remembering. That is something that Modernism didn’t account for; it didn’t want to recognise regional and personal differences. People who have given their whole lives of supporting the classicising aesthetic of Modernism feel invalidated when we talk about the necessary inclusiveness, but diversity and inclusiveness are our only hope. It is not possible any more to plaster over everything with clean elegance. Dirty architecture, fuzzy theory and dirty design must be there."

©Sheila Levrant de Bretteville-NY Subway

Here is another quote I really liked from the interview with Ellen Lupton:

"There is a prevalent notion in the professional world that only if you have eight or more uninterrupted hours per day can you do significant work. But if you respond to other human beings – if you are a relational person – you never really have eight uninterrupted hours in a row. Relational existence is not only attached to gender by history – not by genes, not be biology, not by some essential ‘femaleness’. A relational person thinks about other human beings and their needs during the day. A relational person allows notions about other people to interrupt the trajectory of thinking or designing . . . . The kinds of work habits that are part of this public sphere – that deny relational experience – are precisely the ones I want to challenge. Feminism has allowed me to challenge them; thinking about myself as a woman has allowed me to challenge them. When women are in the workplace, women do as the workplace demands it. Part of feminism is about bringing public, professional values closer to private, domestic values, to break the boundaries of this binary system."

There is a lot to know about Sheila Levrant de Bretteville - much more than I have time to write about here. I had fun researching her art and philosophy and life today.

Here is another transcribed interview in a Yale magazine that is really good too.

Hope you are enjoying this last Thursday before daylight savings goes to winter on Sunday.

'Til Tomorrow!

~Alex

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Tee Corinne

Tee Corinne is next on the list of artists featured in the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show in 2007.

I think of Corinne as more of a writer type artist than a visual type artist. Much of her visual artist work was photography and photographs manipulated in Photoshop.

I think a lot of her work was done in the spirit of making more people accustomed to the visual imagery of women who loved one another both emotionally and sexually being together both with and without clothes.

She used color in her Photoshop manipulated work to convey emotion and mirroring in her earlier photos for visual interest...as I think she was making erotic art but wanted it to be esthetically pleasing - as opposed to pornographic. She also wanted to protect the identities of her models.

©Tee Corinne

To me, Corinne's most important contribution is her use of art and photographs to celebrate the beauty of all parts and all types of the female form. Her models were of all shapes, ages, ethnicities and physical abilities.

I don't know if this was her intent but perhaps she was trying to make society face the physicality of all woman, not just what is considered most appropriately beautiful by some or "the media."

It could be that if we can look more easily at every body than perhaps we can see more easily that we are not that exterior - but are - instead, what resides inside.

If you are interested in more information about Tee Corinne, here is a link to the transcript of an interview she did with Barbara Kyne.

Hope you are having a good Wednesday.

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex