Endurance wins every time!
I painted this Alchemical Bride in honor of one of my sheroes. Luchita Hurtado outlasted all her naysayers, and all the gate keepers who kept her work from the public eye. The Venezuelan artist didn’t get a museum solo show until she was 98 years old, but her 80+ year career as an artist is marked by deep and profound expressions of universality especially as seen through a woman’s experience of the body and of the landscape.
She was still active when she passed away at 100 years old.
She who laughs last laughs best!
They say copying is the greatest compliment!
The only way we know about Helena of Egypt is through copies of her work.
Little is known about Helena, because, well, she was a woman living and working under Greek rule. And for the ancient Greeks women were not real people. They couldn’t vote or own property, and their male relatives could sell them as slaves.
Thankfully Timon, Helena’s father, was an artist and didn’t sell her, teaching her instead. She became so well known that her work was even copied! That’s how we know of her today. A reproduction of her mosaic, The Battle of Issus depicting Alexander the Great defeating Darius III, was discovered in Pompeii.
She may have been a contemporary of Alexander the Great, as a document from 4th c BCE attests, but of course, this attribution is disputed because she’s female, and no other work by a woman of this period has been uncovered.
I wonder when a clear narrative of women’s contribution to our culture will ever arise, when despite all our advances, women are still so underrepresented in museum collections or even art histories?
Alchemical Bride 100 is here!
Can you believe I’ve completed 100 paintings in the Alchemical Bride series? I have been so inspired on this journey of excavating women’s histories!
In honor of the amazing artist, activist, and teacher who devoted her creativity to fight for Chilean freedom.
It may seem like art is a luxury, but don’t be deluded…in the hands of an artist activist, it is a weapon for social justice.
Luz Donoso, was one of the most prominent muralists supporting Salvador Allende’s presidential campaign. A prominent painter and graphic artist, Donoso taught at the university of Chile…until Pinochet’s coup d’etat. As is common in dictatorships, dissenting voices get the axe, and Donoso was lucky she just lost her job at the university, and not her life.
Splash Splash – New Watercolors
This summer I went for some cool studio action with large scale watercolors. You may have heard that global warming heated up the otherwise cool summers of the Pacific Northwest with killing temperatures.
No kidding. At one point it was 108F degrees in the studio with only a window fan to help!
Sometimes you just have to find a way to keep your cool…like by splashing a wash of palest blue over 6 feet of paper. Believe me, every time I stepped up to this piece, that cool splash of underpainting helped me keep on keeping on despite the dangerous heat.
If it looks like I haven’t been active, just know that I’ve been using Instagram as my blogging site, but since the algorithms are choking who can actually see my posts, I will be returning to my own site as a space to update you on my practice and life.
So do keep coming back. I hope to begin engaging here, not just on IG.
Why the scale? After winning a 2021 Artist Trust Fellowship I was able to buy at supplies for large scale projects. These six pieces are the first forays into work I can literally enter.
Her Kind opens on Tuesday at the Sarah Spurgeon Gallery in Ellensburg, WA. The gallery is open to CWU campus and the community, though making appointments is encouraged to ensure safe social distancing.