The Parthenon Friezes
by Wendy Artin
November 4th – November 28th, 2011
Wendy Artin’s exhibition entitled THE PARTHENON FRIEZES, at Gurari Collections, is a demonstration of patience, endurance, visual insight and painting mastery. Galleried at the British Museum, the Parthenon sculptures enjoy world renown for their representational beauty, conflict of a storied past, and their sheer magnitude of sculptural presence. The large monochromatic watercolor paintings in this new series are life-size in scale so as to best evoke the splendor of this ancient parade.
Undertaking the painting of the Parthenon Friezes was a long held goal of Ms. Artin’s. After many years of observation and sketching, the last two years have been dedicated to making this vision a reality. The watercolor paintings attempt to inspire the same awe that we feel when we are in front of the physical bearing of the marble reliefs. Notwithstanding, Artin works the surface of the paper so as to, in her words,“reveal the very tactile experience of wet pigment on porous paper creating an illusion that fades in and out.”
The marble stones themselves, while exquisitely chiseled at the time of their creation, have, over time, been worn into rich and delicate abstracts of what were once three dimensional and refined. Sometimes only indeterminable fragments remain. Wendy Artin allows the image to emerge from the paper with no discernable start or finish. She captures all the gradations of tone within one wet wash, quickly, before the brushstroke dies, she pushes dark in here and lifts light out there, keeping the watercolor fresh and light on the surface.
What we perceive to be the materiality of marble and the rhythmic movement of figures in relief, we experience as the elegant harmony of antiquity with the organic crumbling and stains of time. Artin wants the illusion to be almost total, for the realism to pull the viewer in at the same time that the marks remind one that this is simply wet pigment that has stained the fibers of paper.
Moving from the inanimate nature of stone, the friezes as paintings in watercolor by Wendy Artin, become startlingly alive on a papered surface. To tease out the many thousands of years of this storied work of art, and to do so in the most ethereal of mediums, allows us to experience a new presence of these fabled Parthenon Friezes.
