Columnae
by Wendy Artin
November 24th – December 20th, 2009
“All these should possess strength, utility, and beauty. Strength arises from carrying down the foundations to a good solid bottom, and from making a proper choice of materials without parsimony. Utility arises from a judicious distribution of the parts, so that their purposes be duly answered, and that each have its proper situation. Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other”. De Architectura, Marcus Vitruvius Pollo, (80 –15 BC.)
If strength and utility are absolutes in the built form, then beauty is the result of these conditions creating, defining and participating in context. Wendy Artin has been living, breathing in, and painting in Rome and the Campagna over the last fifteen years. In so doing, she has experienced her art in the pulsations of light, shade, and shadow that this city, and this country of civilization, renders. Living daily with the sites, the sounds and all the senses at play, she paints a history in the present that transcends time. As she so aptly states in the following thoughts –
“ Hot stones, sounds of crickets, great stillness, sun revealing forms and shadows like puddles of clear watercolor. A gust of wind brings gentle wafts of sun-baked plants, the same wind that for centuries has gradually worn away and rounded off the architectural shapes that seem eternal, in their great immobility. This is what stimulated me, the current magic world of architecture created in an ancient past.” Wendy Artin, 2009
Whether inert as in architecture, or in the movement of the live figure, Wendy Artin deftly captures the essence of its being through mastery of the painter’s hand and the timelessness that her innate ability conveys. COLUMNAE, Artin’s upcoming show of watercolors at Gurari Collections, features 60 depictions of columns and landscapes from Rome’s ancient history, a selection of sanguine nudes both male and female, as well as still life watercolor paintings - lemons, grapes, birds.
