Born in Riga, Latvia, Vija Celmins immigrated to Indiana when she was ten years old. She spoke no English, so she focused on drawing, which led her teachers to encourage her creativity and painting. She entered the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis in 1955, where she has said that for the first time in her life, she did not feel like an outsider. In 1961 she began to study Italian monotone still life painter Giorgio Morandi, and painted abstract works. From 1962 until 1980, she went lived in Venice, California first going to school, then painting and sculpting, and working as an instructor at a vareity of universities. In 1981 she moved to New York City to be closer to the artists and art that she liked. She also returned to painting, and later switched to using woodcuts, then to eraser and charcoal, and printmaking.
Celmins is best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of of natural scenes – often copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field – such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. She is a master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, and using a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Celmins renders these scenes with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image.
Celmins’ early work was representational – she recreated commonplace objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils, erasers, and the painted monochrome reproductions of photographs. A common underlying theme in the paintings was violence or conflict, such as war planes, handguns and riot imagery. In the late 1960s through the 1970s, she focused on working in graphite pencil, creating highly detailed photorealistic drawings, based on photographs of natural elements, citing Giorgio Morandi, a master of the pale grey still life, as a major influence. At the end of this period, Celmins also returned to sculpture in a way that incorporated her interest in photorealism.
From the early 1980s forward, she focused on the constellations, moon and oceans, and by 2000, she had begun to produce haunting and distinctive spider webs, again negative images in oil or charcoal. She has said that all these works are based on photographs, and she imparts substantial effort on the built-up surfaces of the images. From 2008, she returned to objects and representative work, with paintings of maps and books, as well as many uses of small graphite tablets - hand held black boards. She also produced series prints of her now well-known waves, spiderwebs, shells and desert floors, many of which were exhibited at the McKee Gallery in June 2010.
I find her work fascinating, and beautiful, because I love photo-realism. I wish that I had the talent and patience to do this type of work, and would love to be able to have the time to focus on my art that way. I think the fact that she turned to art as comfort when she was young interesting as well, because I think many children do that, and I think it shows how influential teachers really can be. I really enjoyed reading her story, and had a hard time choosing which images to use to represent her in this post.
Information from Art21 and Wikapedia
Celmins is best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of of natural scenes – often copied from photographs that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field – such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. She is a master of several mediums, including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes, and using a nuanced palette of blacks and grays, Celmins renders these scenes with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on a single image.
Celmins’ early work was representational – she recreated commonplace objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils, erasers, and the painted monochrome reproductions of photographs. A common underlying theme in the paintings was violence or conflict, such as war planes, handguns and riot imagery. In the late 1960s through the 1970s, she focused on working in graphite pencil, creating highly detailed photorealistic drawings, based on photographs of natural elements, citing Giorgio Morandi, a master of the pale grey still life, as a major influence. At the end of this period, Celmins also returned to sculpture in a way that incorporated her interest in photorealism.
From the early 1980s forward, she focused on the constellations, moon and oceans, and by 2000, she had begun to produce haunting and distinctive spider webs, again negative images in oil or charcoal. She has said that all these works are based on photographs, and she imparts substantial effort on the built-up surfaces of the images. From 2008, she returned to objects and representative work, with paintings of maps and books, as well as many uses of small graphite tablets - hand held black boards. She also produced series prints of her now well-known waves, spiderwebs, shells and desert floors, many of which were exhibited at the McKee Gallery in June 2010.
I find her work fascinating, and beautiful, because I love photo-realism. I wish that I had the talent and patience to do this type of work, and would love to be able to have the time to focus on my art that way. I think the fact that she turned to art as comfort when she was young interesting as well, because I think many children do that, and I think it shows how influential teachers really can be. I really enjoyed reading her story, and had a hard time choosing which images to use to represent her in this post.
Information from Art21 and Wikapedia