A 2009 spring painting, Ariettes Oublieés, will be shown at the Wayne Art Center’s members exhibit, juried by Michael Gallagher, a professor and painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The exhibit runs from October 25th to November 21st, 2009.
I’m happy to show this piece, it’s one of my recent favorites. While I titled it after a Claude Debussy song set to a Paul Verlaine poem, it really began with a dream. The dream had something to do with fractured light, or falling water in light or something of that sort. I was so struck by it that the next day I tried to paint what I had seen in the dream. I also see the work as a turning point stylistically; looser and somewhat less rigid than previous work, with a more modulated palette.
It also had something to with the beautiful tulip magnolia in my front yard that drops its petals in early spring.
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Quita Brodhead founded Wayne Art Center in 1930. Born into privilege in 1901, she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Arthur Carles. Exhibiting widely during her life, I saw her work at the Woodmere Museum of Art when I exhibited there this past spring. She lived to be 101 and never stopped painting.Â
One of her teachers at the academy told her to ‘go home and wash dishes’. She says ‘I don’t know what made me stick it out….I just didn’t want to admit defeat.’
I love her laughing at her own abstractions. Enjoy this clip of her talking about her work and early days at the academy.
What a rich evocative painting! It reminds me of a red Bordeux wine in the way it hints and cajoles a variety of effects in one sip. (Even on the screen of a Blackberry on distant tarmac.) This painting evokes meat or exposed flesh (much like a Bacon), fairy circles and leprechauns.
No Irish reference…. but you have a vivid imagination!