Aphrodite
by Wendy Artin
October 6th – November 12th, 2000
At the dawn of the 21st century, the artistic pilgrimage to Italy continues. Six years ago, Boston native Wendy Artin arrived in Rome to paint for a few months. She was instantly captivated by the city's light, its romance, and its endless capacity to fascinate and intrigue. Since coming to Rome, Artin has explored myriad aspects of the city in her watercolors and drawings: its weather-beaten classical statues and its elegiac parasol pines; its noble domes and its powerful, evocative ruins; the vegetables in the open-air market in the Campo de' Fiori that, in Artin's hands, look like pieces of sculpture; the models who pose for her in weekly drawing sessions. With great sensitivity and unsurpassed technique, Artin has mined a rich range of subject matter, producing a substantial body of work that is striking as it is varied, work that honors Rome as a place and Rome as an ideal in the tradition of classical Western art.
"To paint classically is, for me, to pay tribute to light, to form, and to the beauty of the landscape, architecture, and sculpture," says Artin. "It is to pay tribute to the art of painting itself. Rome is a place where you can paint outdoors nearly all year round. It is a slow city, a city suffused with tradition, history, and romance. It is a place to dream, to linger over life rather than to rush through it."
"Rome challenges me daily as an artist," Artin continues. "The moving sun makes crisp shadows on white marble statues like puddles of watercolor, fleeting. With time I have learned to decipher the visual overload of Rome--to look closely and with patience, to find the most telling image or elegant composition in the city's famed multitude of layers."
Artin's new exhibition at Gurari Collections brings together sixty sepia and sanguine watercolors on Indian jute and cotton paper, as well as large format oil washes on canvas. The head of Aphrodite for which the show takes its name comes alive in Artin's hands, changing expressions with the changing light, an eternally suggestive mythological figure. Among Artin's other subjects are the Roman Forum, the Palatino, the Piazza Navona; tritons, putti, and nereids; nude figures, both male
and female; and ostensibly humbler (though in the end, equally refined) objects from nature, such as squash, cabbage, and beets. Whether she is painting the common Roman artichoke or a river god by the great Baroque sculptor Bernini, at the center of Artin's work, as at the center of her heart, is the infinite dazzlement of the Eternal City, a city that, for Wendy Artin, "becomes more magical to me with every passing day and every passing year."