15 thoughts on “WEEK NINE – CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ARTIST (POST 1970)”
Artist: Jenny Saville
Known for her large-scale works of nude women, Saville notes that her fascination with this particular subject is due to Pablo Picasso because of his way as an “painter that made subjects as if ‘they were solidly there….not fleeting’ “. Saville was born in May 1970 and is a British contemporary artist who currently works and lives in Oxford, England. She earned her degree in art at the Glasgow School of Art and moved on to the University of Cincinnati where she earned a 6 month scholarship. Described as a painter that uses traditional methods while reinventing figure painting and its context in art history. Her work involves large brush strokes and patches of oil paint while featuring distorted flesh; similar to the “mark of a plastic surgery operation”. Apparently in 1994, she spent many hours observing plastic surgery in New York City (I think this is not only extremely interesting but a bit bizarre and grotesque). Her works are also extremely large and she has focused mainly on the female body, devoting her work to figurative painting. She has also painted large scale paintings of transgender people and has “published sketches and documents that include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.” I find her work to be intriguing and raw, but also thought-provoking.
I chose a current day artist named Charmaine Olivia as my (post 1970) contemporary painter because I love the vivid colors and blending techniques used in her work. She’s not well-known enough to have a wiki page yet but I like her style and think she would be a challenging but fun artist to imitate when it comes time to painting my own self portrait. She is a self-taught, full-time artist working in San Francisco. She is known for using her fingers to blend the colors on her canvas, which is something I’d like to perfect, and she mainly paints female figures. I also love the backgrounds in a lot of her pieces, either being colorful explosions around the subject or a muted color with visible brushstrokes.
here are some of my favorites:
Gillian Carnegie was born in 1971, and is an English painter. Carnegie gained her masters in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She is well known for using oils and her technique of building up the paint to create an almost sculptural affect. She uses this technique primarily in her landscape paintings. She also has a series of nudes in which she portrays female butts, which honestly I just find amusing. She was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2005 but was unfortunately a runner up.
Tucked 1998
Fleurs de huile 2001
Black Square 2008
Gallagher is an American artist from Rhode Island born in 1965. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. She often uses themes of race in her works, even if she incorporates the themes subtly. In some of her works she modifies advertisements of black women through collages. Each of these pieces becomes part of a larger work when she exhibits them together. I love this about her work because each of her pieces stand on their own, but the impact becomes so much greater when the same style is repeated over and over again. It kind of reminded me of our 50 paintings, and how the exhibit became more about the repetition of style and collection of similar (but different) images instead of each individual work.
Scher is a modern female artist who engages in graphic design, painting, and art education. Her primary mode of painting is in a series of maps. They are painted in a way that emphasizes how certain places are perceived. The United States (1999) is painted with lists of facts about cities, Africa (2003) is painted in black and white to convey the history of colonialism in the continent, and Japan (2004) is painted with bright colors imitating the land of the red rising sun. Her work forces her audience to consider social and political realities and impressions of various geological locations.
Brown’s paintings combine figuration and abstraction. She has become known for her painting style that is suggestive of painters such as de Kooning and Oskar Kokoschka, and uses rich colors and thick paint application to create her works. . She uses sexuality and attraction as important themes in her work, which gives them a more feminine feel. She often titles her paintings after classic films (ex: The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story, The Fugitive Kind). Brown often works on large groups of paintings at one time, allowing layers of paint to dry as she works on other pieces. Critics have given conflicting reviews of her work, calling it either powerful and bold, or lacking character and hectic.
Sue Williams (1954-)
Williams studied at the California Institute for Art and Design in Valencia in 1972 and began her painting style by combing text into her pieces. All of her work focuses in her belief that there is a wide-spread disrespect towards women, causing hatred and violence which in turns leads to gender inequalities. Her artistic style uses anger and incompetence to create the hysteria that is gender inequality. She has also looked at the way the female nude body has been used, stretched and mutilated in art since Cubism and onwards into modern art.
Artist: Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938. She received a BFA from the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis, and later earned her MFA in painting from the University of California. Her renditions of natural scenes often lacked a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field. SHe would work for months on a single image. She limits her palette to black, white, and grays that create a hyperrealistic image. Celmins currently resides in New York and California.
Danielle Orchard was born in a small home and was one of six children. This sense of compactness is evident in the jumbled look of her artwork. Her work has been compared to that of Dana Schutz. The main focus of her work is “tightly wrapped package of domesticity, and how it sometimes breaks down in the midst of the sloppiness of the body.”
Françoise Nielly is a contemporary French painter who was born in Marseille and is now living in Paris. She usually paints expressive, often close-up, portraits or images of the human body by using a palette knife and oil paint. She uses these materials to lay down thick layers of paint and to later sculpt into them. She uses a vibrant color palette that features bright, highly contrasting colors. Her father was an architect and taught her as a child that there was “no room for mistakes,” which influenced the intricacy of her paintings. I appreciate the way that her portraits are highly detailed despite their texture and the thick application of paint. I also think that it’s interesting how she transitioned into the art world. Prior to her art career, Nielly worked in the advertising and fashion industries, but left them 11 years ago to pursue a career that would allow her to express her own ideas. That’s a concept that I personally relate to when I think about the type of career that I want to have in the future. Her paintings Untited 872 – Charlotte and Untitled 642 are below.
Elspeth McLean is a contemoporary Australian artist living in Canada who creates works she describes as “dotillism.” Her acrylic paintings are so vivid, colorful and beautiful and are made completely out of dots. From a distance you can’t tell that these paintings are made out of dots because McLean is a master of blending the colors, but as you move closer you can start to see the individual dots in each element. She is famous for her mandala stone paintings, which are perfectly circular stones she finds on the beach near her home in Canada upon which she paints mandala designs. I love looking at her work and the variety of colors that she blends together so beautifully. She has a large online presence and an etsy shop where she sells some of her works, but she has also exhibited her work throughout New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Check out her Instagram!
Bunny Harvey paintings focus on the hidden or unseen of landscapes. She wants to capture sounds and emotions that are associated with the real life scene. Harvey looks to implement the buzzing of insects and bird songs. She aims to have her paintings serve as guides for one to lose themselves in the reverie. She uses a broad range of visual vocabulary to showcase the landscapes in order to explore connections between a direct and thoughtful observation, spontaneous sensual input with the pleasure of invention. Harvey additionally wants her paintings to stand on their own as reminders that it is a wonderful thing to get lost in the beauty of nature in all that it is. Her goal is that after getting lost in the artwork, the viewer can come away with a fresh mindset and new energy. Below is the painting Field Chatter, which actively displays the noise and movement from the insects.
Laura Normandin utilizes a strong sense of femininity and domesticity in her work. Her main mediums are often collages and cut paper, but she also paints with gouache and acrylics. Her artist statement describes a symbolism of domesticity where “rust, moth, and thief” are imminent. Her work uncovers the small, quiet strength of domesticity, decay, and genealogy. She created a lot of work with Martha Stewart, but my favorite work of hers is her album art she created for Indie-Folk/Experimental artist Sufjan Stevens. She created the art for his album cover “Say Yes! To Michigan!” album – it is super naturalistic, warm, and nostalgic – modeled after a vintage postcard. I admire the feelings purity and naivety she captures in her work. This illustration/painting was made with gouache.
Elizabeth Peyton is known for stylized portraits of her friends close to her, and pop celebrities. Some relate her to Andy Warhol with her idealized colors and pop art. She uses lots of different techniques and subjects in both her prints and paintings. She recieved the 14th Annual Larry Aldrich Award honoring an artist who has had a significant impact on visual culture. The museum of Modern art has 14 of her paintings on display currently. She is known for a study of plants and motifs of life and death throughout her works.
Ida Applebroog was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been creating social commentary pieces ever since. Her work is distinguished by anonymous generalized figures of humans, animals, or the combination of the two. Much of her work comments on gender and gender identity, the relevance of media in violence and vice versa, and political or personal power struggles.
This piece is called Jessika. This piece stood out to me because of the stark contrast of the female figure’s eyes from the rest of the piece. The piece is bold and frightening and very interpretable. The figure is generic and unidentifiable as anything. One can only assume it is a female because of the title. Because the figures in Applebroog’s works are so generic, I think it is more relatable to more people.
painting 202 
Artist: Jenny Saville
Known for her large-scale works of nude women, Saville notes that her fascination with this particular subject is due to Pablo Picasso because of his way as an “painter that made subjects as if ‘they were solidly there….not fleeting’ “. Saville was born in May 1970 and is a British contemporary artist who currently works and lives in Oxford, England. She earned her degree in art at the Glasgow School of Art and moved on to the University of Cincinnati where she earned a 6 month scholarship. Described as a painter that uses traditional methods while reinventing figure painting and its context in art history. Her work involves large brush strokes and patches of oil paint while featuring distorted flesh; similar to the “mark of a plastic surgery operation”. Apparently in 1994, she spent many hours observing plastic surgery in New York City (I think this is not only extremely interesting but a bit bizarre and grotesque). Her works are also extremely large and she has focused mainly on the female body, devoting her work to figurative painting. She has also painted large scale paintings of transgender people and has “published sketches and documents that include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients.” I find her work to be intriguing and raw, but also thought-provoking.
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Artist: Charmaine Olivia
I chose a current day artist named Charmaine Olivia as my (post 1970) contemporary painter because I love the vivid colors and blending techniques used in her work. She’s not well-known enough to have a wiki page yet but I like her style and think she would be a challenging but fun artist to imitate when it comes time to painting my own self portrait. She is a self-taught, full-time artist working in San Francisco. She is known for using her fingers to blend the colors on her canvas, which is something I’d like to perfect, and she mainly paints female figures. I also love the backgrounds in a lot of her pieces, either being colorful explosions around the subject or a muted color with visible brushstrokes.
here are some of my favorites:
LikeLike
Gillian Carnegie was born in 1971, and is an English painter. Carnegie gained her masters in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She is well known for using oils and her technique of building up the paint to create an almost sculptural affect. She uses this technique primarily in her landscape paintings. She also has a series of nudes in which she portrays female butts, which honestly I just find amusing. She was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2005 but was unfortunately a runner up.
Tucked 1998
Fleurs de huile 2001
Black Square 2008
LikeLike
Artist: Ellen Gallagher
Gallagher is an American artist from Rhode Island born in 1965. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. She often uses themes of race in her works, even if she incorporates the themes subtly. In some of her works she modifies advertisements of black women through collages. Each of these pieces becomes part of a larger work when she exhibits them together. I love this about her work because each of her pieces stand on their own, but the impact becomes so much greater when the same style is repeated over and over again. It kind of reminded me of our 50 paintings, and how the exhibit became more about the repetition of style and collection of similar (but different) images instead of each individual work.
LikeLike
Paula Scher
Scher is a modern female artist who engages in graphic design, painting, and art education. Her primary mode of painting is in a series of maps. They are painted in a way that emphasizes how certain places are perceived. The United States (1999) is painted with lists of facts about cities, Africa (2003) is painted in black and white to convey the history of colonialism in the continent, and Japan (2004) is painted with bright colors imitating the land of the red rising sun. Her work forces her audience to consider social and political realities and impressions of various geological locations.
LikeLike
Artist: Cecily Brown
Brown’s paintings combine figuration and abstraction. She has become known for her painting style that is suggestive of painters such as de Kooning and Oskar Kokoschka, and uses rich colors and thick paint application to create her works. . She uses sexuality and attraction as important themes in her work, which gives them a more feminine feel. She often titles her paintings after classic films (ex: The Pyjama Game, The Bedtime Story, The Fugitive Kind). Brown often works on large groups of paintings at one time, allowing layers of paint to dry as she works on other pieces. Critics have given conflicting reviews of her work, calling it either powerful and bold, or lacking character and hectic.
LikeLike
Sue Williams (1954-)
Williams studied at the California Institute for Art and Design in Valencia in 1972 and began her painting style by combing text into her pieces. All of her work focuses in her belief that there is a wide-spread disrespect towards women, causing hatred and violence which in turns leads to gender inequalities. Her artistic style uses anger and incompetence to create the hysteria that is gender inequality. She has also looked at the way the female nude body has been used, stretched and mutilated in art since Cubism and onwards into modern art.
LikeLike
Artist: Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938. She received a BFA from the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis, and later earned her MFA in painting from the University of California. Her renditions of natural scenes often lacked a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field. SHe would work for months on a single image. She limits her palette to black, white, and grays that create a hyperrealistic image. Celmins currently resides in New York and California.
LikeLike
Danielle Orchard
Danielle Orchard was born in a small home and was one of six children. This sense of compactness is evident in the jumbled look of her artwork. Her work has been compared to that of Dana Schutz. The main focus of her work is “tightly wrapped package of domesticity, and how it sometimes breaks down in the midst of the sloppiness of the body.”
LikeLike
Artist: Françoise Nielly
Françoise Nielly is a contemporary French painter who was born in Marseille and is now living in Paris. She usually paints expressive, often close-up, portraits or images of the human body by using a palette knife and oil paint. She uses these materials to lay down thick layers of paint and to later sculpt into them. She uses a vibrant color palette that features bright, highly contrasting colors. Her father was an architect and taught her as a child that there was “no room for mistakes,” which influenced the intricacy of her paintings. I appreciate the way that her portraits are highly detailed despite their texture and the thick application of paint. I also think that it’s interesting how she transitioned into the art world. Prior to her art career, Nielly worked in the advertising and fashion industries, but left them 11 years ago to pursue a career that would allow her to express her own ideas. That’s a concept that I personally relate to when I think about the type of career that I want to have in the future. Her paintings Untited 872 – Charlotte and Untitled 642 are below.
Untited 872 – Charlotte
Untitled 642
LikeLike
Artist: Elspeth McLean
Elspeth McLean is a contemoporary Australian artist living in Canada who creates works she describes as “dotillism.” Her acrylic paintings are so vivid, colorful and beautiful and are made completely out of dots. From a distance you can’t tell that these paintings are made out of dots because McLean is a master of blending the colors, but as you move closer you can start to see the individual dots in each element. She is famous for her mandala stone paintings, which are perfectly circular stones she finds on the beach near her home in Canada upon which she paints mandala designs. I love looking at her work and the variety of colors that she blends together so beautifully. She has a large online presence and an etsy shop where she sells some of her works, but she has also exhibited her work throughout New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Check out her Instagram!
LikeLike
Artist: Bunny Harvey
Bunny Harvey paintings focus on the hidden or unseen of landscapes. She wants to capture sounds and emotions that are associated with the real life scene. Harvey looks to implement the buzzing of insects and bird songs. She aims to have her paintings serve as guides for one to lose themselves in the reverie. She uses a broad range of visual vocabulary to showcase the landscapes in order to explore connections between a direct and thoughtful observation, spontaneous sensual input with the pleasure of invention. Harvey additionally wants her paintings to stand on their own as reminders that it is a wonderful thing to get lost in the beauty of nature in all that it is. Her goal is that after getting lost in the artwork, the viewer can come away with a fresh mindset and new energy. Below is the painting Field Chatter, which actively displays the noise and movement from the insects.
LikeLike
Artist: Laura Normandin
Laura Normandin utilizes a strong sense of femininity and domesticity in her work. Her main mediums are often collages and cut paper, but she also paints with gouache and acrylics. Her artist statement describes a symbolism of domesticity where “rust, moth, and thief” are imminent. Her work uncovers the small, quiet strength of domesticity, decay, and genealogy. She created a lot of work with Martha Stewart, but my favorite work of hers is her album art she created for Indie-Folk/Experimental artist Sufjan Stevens. She created the art for his album cover “Say Yes! To Michigan!” album – it is super naturalistic, warm, and nostalgic – modeled after a vintage postcard. I admire the feelings purity and naivety she captures in her work. This illustration/painting was made with gouache.
LikeLike
Elizabeth Peyton is known for stylized portraits of her friends close to her, and pop celebrities. Some relate her to Andy Warhol with her idealized colors and pop art. She uses lots of different techniques and subjects in both her prints and paintings. She recieved the 14th Annual Larry Aldrich Award honoring an artist who has had a significant impact on visual culture. The museum of Modern art has 14 of her paintings on display currently. She is known for a study of plants and motifs of life and death throughout her works.
LikeLike
Artist: Ida Applebroog
Ida Applebroog was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been creating social commentary pieces ever since. Her work is distinguished by anonymous generalized figures of humans, animals, or the combination of the two. Much of her work comments on gender and gender identity, the relevance of media in violence and vice versa, and political or personal power struggles.
This piece is called Jessika. This piece stood out to me because of the stark contrast of the female figure’s eyes from the rest of the piece. The piece is bold and frightening and very interpretable. The figure is generic and unidentifiable as anything. One can only assume it is a female because of the title. Because the figures in Applebroog’s works are so generic, I think it is more relatable to more people.
LikeLike