Clarity Of Vision - Isabel Quintanilla

An appreciation of the importance of the ordinary, the everyday in our lives has a long history in art.  It dates back at least as far as the early 18th Century in France with artist Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin and his painting “A Lady Taking Tea” from 1735.  The setting is unpretentious, modest even and there is an air of calm self-absorption in the scene.  The skill of the artist is in transforming an ordinary occasion with simple furnishings into something almost seductive.

Chardin, A Lady Taking Tea, 1735, oil on canvas, 81 x 99 cm

Author Alain De Botton argues that given the way the world is going, we need all the reliable, unassuming and inexpensive satisfactions we can get.  He believes that it lies in the power of art to honour the elusive but real value of ordinary life.

This may have been the motivation behind the art of Isabel Quintanilla (1938 – 2017).  In Spain, the practice of granting a special reverence to ordinary everyday objects dates back even further to the Baroque masters such as Velazquez and his ‘bodegones’; that is, art depicting pantry items, game, food and drink.  Quintanilla was a member of the Madrid School of realists who graduated from the Academia de San Fernando, where rigorous training in the traditional academic manner had been upheld since the 18th Century.

Quintanilla, Cabracho (Scorpionfish), 1992, oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm

Like other pupils of the time, including Antonio Lopez Garcia who is arguably the most famous of the Madrid realists, she had to develop her skills against the backdrop of the intellectual and artistic repression of the middle years of Franco’s dictatorship.

While some may regard the art of the Madrid realists as minimalism, what makes them unique is their ability to “de-nude, de-code and explicate the essence of our collective consciousness”.   What we are viewing is the object itself, free of any socio/political contexts.  The subject matter of Quintanilla’s work ranges from simple still life to panoramic landscapes.

Quintanilla, Glass On Top Of A Fridge, 1972, pencil on paper,  48 x 36 cm

Viewing work like this is very instructive to me.  Occasionally I get sucked into producing grandiose scenes forgetting that some of the simplest compositions can make the best paintings - if the artist has the skill.   Perhaps it’s a matter of being in the moment, focusing on the object itself free of any distractions.

In his review of a 1996 exhibition of Spanish Contemporary Realists held in London, Edward J Sullivan writes of the absolute immediacy and intensity of their vision.  But he also argues that it’s important not to draw to close a link between their work and that of the Baroque masters of the past.  Artists such as Velazquez were operating largely under the strict guidelines laid down by the Catholic Church and the counter reformation.

Quintanilla, El Telefono, 1996, oil on board, 110 x 100 cm

Unfortunately, whether I scanned this image from a catalogue, or downloaded it off the net, I am unable to convey the absolute clarity of the vision in this work.  This is beyond photorealism and I think it’s because of the use of light.  There is an intimacy in this scene that would seem to run contrary to the cold, clinical hard-edged nature of much photo-realist art.  You get the sense that you are entering someone’s private world.

Quintanilla, Vendana (Window), 1970, oil on board, 131 x 100 cm

Views through windows have been a popular topic for artists for centuries.  What fascinates me is the suggestion of furniture in the bottom left of the composition.  There is also the cool, clear light and a sense of imprisonment in the scene.  

Quintanilla had exhibited either individually or in group shows at the Prado in Madrid, the Marlborough Gallery in London and at many other venues.  Her work forms part of the collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and in various galleries throughout Europe.

References;

Books;

“Contemporary Spanish Realists”, 1996, Marlborough Fine Art, London

“Art As Therapy”, 2014, Alain De Botton & John Armstrong

The Net;

Leandro Navarro Gallery

Dorothea Tanning - 70 Years An Artist

‘Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.’
– Dorothea Tanning, 2002

In 2019, Tate Modern held the first large-scale exhibition of American artist Dorothea Tanning in 25 years, bringing together 100 works from her 70 year career – enigmatic paintings and sculpture.

Dorothea Tanning (1910 – 2012) was born in Galesburg, Illinois, a town where “nothing happened except the wallpaper”, she said.  It’s claimed her childhood was repressed and tedious and it wasn’t until she arrived in New York and fell in with the surrealists that she found her true self.  She wasn’t keen to explain what the inspirations were for her disturbing night fantasies or what exactly was going on.  But she enjoyed an enduring career as a painter, sculptor and writer.  And this despite living in the shadows of her famous husband Max Ernst for 30 years.

Dorothea Tanning with Max Ernst

It was Tanning’s powerful 1942 self portrait ‘Birthday’ that first attracted the attention of Ernst.  Later he divorced his third wife Peggy Guggenheim and married Tanning in a curious joint ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in 1946.  Afterwards, Tanning and Ernst moved to Sedona, Arizona where they built a house and immersed themselves in their art.  So harsh was the landscape that sunflowers were about the only flower that could survive there.

Birthday, 1942, oil on canvas, 102 x 65 cm

She said she wanted to depict “unknown but knowable states”, to suggest there was more to life than meets the eye.  She wanted to combine the familiar with the strange to create an unsettling surrealist space. Her most famous painting, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) from 1943 got its title from a Mozart serenade and it’s not clear if we are looking at 2 girls, or the same girl before and after seeing the threatening sunflower.  It’s thought that the girls are Dorothea Tanning and that the painting was inspired by a nightmare.  The whole painting reeks of subconscious anxiety and the sunflower is thought to be a masculine presence.  Perhaps some childhood trauma is being remembered here.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, oil on canvas 41 x 61 cm

“Please don’t ask me to explain my paintings, I don’t think it’s possible.  I paint, I can only describe this as a drive.”

It no doubt grated with her that for years she was labelled a woman surrealist. From the mid 1950’s, her work became more abstract reflecting her passion for dance, music and performance - perhaps combined with her earlier love of gothic and romantic literature.

Dogs of Cynthera 1963, oil on canvas, 197 x 297 cm

In the mid 1960’s she and Ernst moved to Paris and she declared that she was “fed up with turpentine” after which she began to produce soft sculptures using her Singer sewing machine.  This resulted in her installation ‘Hotel Du Pavot – Chambre 202’ of 1970-73 which consists of figures seemingly trying to escape the hotel room (perhaps the same hotel from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik).  Furniture seems to be metamorphosing into limbs, thighs and the scene is almost macabre.  “I set myself terrible goals” she once said.  “People said these sculptures are too soft, they won’t last.  They might as well have said they are dead”.  Her message may have been that life and love are soft and won’t last forever hence there is a deliberate fragility in her sculptures.

Hotel Du Pavot, 1970-73, installation, wool fabric synthetic fur and ping pong balls

Tanning believes this work to be directly related to a song popular in her childhood.

      In room two hundred and two
      The walls keep talkin' to you
      I'll never tell you what they said
      So turn out the light and come to bed.

The song was written in the 1920’s and laments the fate of Kitty Kane, a one-time Chicago gangster’s wife who poisoned herself in room 202 of a local hotel.

Like so many artists, Tanning’s art was her means of understanding the world around her.  She continued to write until the end – her last book of poems was published when she turned 100.

“I’ve done everything I could to escape my biography, but I think we’re prisoners of our events.”

Tanning at the Tate exhibition.  The painting to her left is 'Tango Lives' from 1977

References;

Dreamideamachine.com

Tate.org.uk

The Art of the Dark, BBC TV

dorotheatanning.org

Mandy Martin - Artist & Environmental Activist

Australian artist Mandy Martin died in July at the age of 68 after a long battle with cancer.  Described as a highly influential artist, educator and a passionate environmentalist, her art often explored the fraught relationship between humans and the environment.  She graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1975, where she also taught.  Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that I can only skin over the surface here.

From early on in her career she produced politically engaged work such as a screenprint referencing the Vietnam War which appeared in the New York feminist magazine Heresies in 1977.

Screen print for Heresies Magazine, 1977

For many years her work focussed on the impact of mining on the landscape of New South Wales and for 20 years she kept returning to the Cadia open cut mine to commence a new body of work.  A project would commence with a trip with her sketchbook placed on an ironing board, using pigments she found in the area as well as inks.

“My work has always been about the interplay between the natural environment and the industrial, you can’t talk about the degradation of the environment without talking about what you want to preserve in that environment”.  Some of her work presents a simple vision of the natural world contrasting with the impact of the industrial.  “It’s a juxtaposition between the two.”

Mandy Martin with her work Four Riders from 2016

Martin’s father was a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide and her mother an artist and she would often go on field trips with them, with her father collecting specimens whilst her mother painted.  Thus she thought it natural to see the interrelationships between science and art.  Her work has been credited with bringing an intellectual perspective to the issues of environmental degradation – not to scare people but to make them think.

She rarely used tube paints, instead preparing her own pigments which were often supplied by farmers, archaeologists and friends.  “I do some loose impasto work to begin with, then I lie it down and stain it and flood on more pigment and that kind of half destroys the work.  It sounds weird but lots of wonderful things happen, it runs and blurs and once it dries I work back into those ‘mistakes’ as it were.”  Martin didn’t like the ‘hand of the artist’ being evident in her work or the mannered brush mark.  Instead, she wanted blocks of colour and scrape marks.

Homeground 3, Ochre, pigment & oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 3 m

She felt that she was still painting the same picture, that her techniques and subject matter hadn’t really changed since the 1980’s.  “I’ve always been interested in texture and surface and because I do a lot of landscape based work, it’s natural to want to incorporate the materiality of the land.”

The aboriginal scar trees dotted across the central west of NSW (including on her property near Mandurama) were an influence on her work, and she worked collaboratively with a native elder Trisha Carroll in works such as Haunted.  Martin found that Trisha brought a spiritual dimension to her work which she found fascinating.

Haunted 1, ochre, pigment, oil on linen 2004, 1.5 m x 5 m

She had also been keen to push the boundaries of her work, which included a collaborative multimedia effort with her son Alexander Boynes  titled ‘Homeground’, a combination of her painting and his digital work.  I saw one of their collaborations at Latrobe Regional Gallery in 2019 – it was quite an eye-opener.

In relation to the huge scarring of the landscape caused by open cut mining, Martin says “They talk about offsets but how do you offset something like that?  You can’t, once it’s gone it’s gone”

“I used to do a lot of detailed drawing, but I’m getting much older and arthritic so I’m being a lot broader and looser now.  I love painting because I’m totally seduced by the materials and textures and working on a good piece of linen with my favourite ochres and pigments makes me pretty happy.”  Following her death, the Canberra Times described Martin as deeply ethical and beautifully human. “Her art engaged society, spoke of its challenges and addressed the existential threats that it faced.”

Red Ochre Cove, oil, 1987, 3 m x 12 m installed in the committee room, Parliament House Canberra

Martin held numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas and her work can be found in many collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

An article posted by Australian Galleries tells us that in the final weeks of Mandy’s life, she requested that donations could be made to assist an annual artist grant, which her family would like to name in her honour. The details of this artist grant which will support creative responses to the climate crisis are currently being finalised.  Donations can be made through the independent non-profit organisation CLIMARTE.

References;

Awarewomenartists.com

“The Beauty and the Terror” – Tom Griffiths (Inside Story)

Mandy Martin: Homeground Mini Doco – Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Canberra Times

The World of Imogen Cunningham

A recent online article posted by the National Gallery of Victoria included a black and white photograph by American photographer Imogen Cunningham (1883 - 1976) which drew my attention for its sharpness of observation and clean abstract qualities.  The challenge here is to condense a long career into a few paragraphs, but here goes.

Agave Design 1 1920's (NGV)

In 1901 she managed to save $15 and sent it off to a correspondence school in Pennsylvania.  They sent her a camera and some glass plates and she started out on her own, and what followed was the longest photographic career in the history of the medium – 75 years.  After graduating from the University of Washington with a major in chemistry, she was awarded a grant to study photographic chemistry in Dresden in 1909.

Magnolia Blossom 1925 (Artsy)

Raising three young children in the early 20th century meant that Cunningham was limited in her choice of subject matter.  Whilst they slept during the afternoons, she would photograph plants in her garden.  With regard to Agave Design 1 the NGV article discusses Cunningham arranging the leaves in a way that allowed her to create bold contrasts between light and dark.  She seems to have created another reality by focussing on form, pattern and light.

On Oregon Beach 1967 (Artnet)

Cunningham was one of the first women to photograph the male nude and received much criticism for doing so.  “I was described as an immoral woman.”  She said she wanted everything in her photographs to be smoothly in focus, or if it’s out of focus it has to be for a reason.  Also the quality of gradations and value is important.  “In order to make a good photograph you have to be enthusiastic about it and think about it like a poet.”

Part of the reason for the longevity of her career is that in later years she began to print images that she had previously neglected because “your point of view changes.”After photographing the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham she was asked to go to Hollywood and when asked for her preferences, she said ugly men because “they don’t complain.”

Triangles Plus One 1928 (Artnet)

Her relationship with her theosophical leaning father was unusual, he once said to her “why do you go to school for so long just to be a dirty photographer?”  Yet at the same time he made a very good darkroom for her in the woodshed.

“I don’t hunt for things (subject matter – I assume), I just wait until something strikes me.  Of course I hunt for an impression when I photograph people……I do portraits because people pay me for them and I still have to live…… I’ve always been glad for a certain amount of poverty – all I want to do is live.”

Frida Kahlo 1931 (Artsy)

When photographing anyone who does something with their hands, she always wanted to include the hands. 

Her work seems to be based on a certain formalism with a mixture of abstract and realist elements, but with an almost intuitive understanding of composition.  Over the decades she produced a staggering body of work comprising bold, contemporary forms.  There is a visual precision that is not scientific, but which presents the lines and textures of her subjects articulated by natural light and their own gestures. Her work has been described as refreshing, yet formal and sensitive.  Her floral arrangements of the 1920’s ultimately became her most acclaimed images. Cunningham’s real artistic legacy was secured through her inclusion in the "F64" show in San Francisco in 1932 which included notable photographers including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Cunningham’s work continues to be exhibited and collected around the world.

Imogen & Twinka, Yosemite 1974, photographed by Judy Dater

References;

National Gallery of Victoria

Museum of North West Art

Portrait of Imogen (1988) - directed by Meg Partridge