Vija celmins biography of christopher walken

She says "I've always liked the scientific image because it's sort of anonymous, and often the artist for the image has been a machine, and I like the idea that I can relive that image and put it in a human context". Of Jupiter Moon - Constellation Celmins said, "the Jupiter moon is such a fabulous image, which I found in one of my travels through bookstores looking at pictures" features two images printed on the same page: one a photorealistic image of the moons of Jupiter, and below it, the artist's etching of a constellation.

Vija celmins biography of christopher walken: Vija Celmins was born

Curator Stephanie Straine writes, "The Jupiter moon mezzotint is covered in repeating black dots in a grid arrangement, like newspaper photo-registration marks. The mezzotint's tonal variations, in combination with the soft-ground lift, produces a spectrum of velvety grey tones on the surface, with the print achieving an opaque black at the top right corner of the image".

Celmins's drawings of constellations developed out of a deep exploration of the graphite medium. She says "As I was working with the pencil, I got into some of the qualities of the pencil itself. That's how the galaxies developed".

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Indeed, she has stated elsewhere that she sees drawing "as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of going from one place to another. One draws to define one thing from another. Draws proportions, adjusts scale. It is impossible to paint without drawing". Straine says of this work, "it is very abstract, suggestive of a decorative fabric pattern.

Its visual source cannot be easily discerned; it is only the title that reveals it to be a rectangular section of a densely packed constellation". Celmins has remarked that with her constellation pieces much like her images of oceans and deserts the viewer is encouraged to "roam over the image" and has referred to them as her "eye dazzlers".

From aroundCelmins began creating photorealistic images of oceans, a theme that came to dominate her creative thinking for the next decade. She has explored the oceanic in painting, graphite drawings, dry-point, woodcut, and lithograph. Like others in the series, Drypoint - Ocean Surfacedenies the viewer any fixed horizon or focal point, creating rather a sense of a calm watery infinity.

However, Celmins has taken steps here to delineate the boundaries of her ocean images through the inclusion of a white border. Celmins has explained that "The edge and approaching the edge [of her images] are important events in my work, especially since the image is defined by it". Arts writer Sarah Manguso explains, "Still in Venice [LA], now closer to the beach in a new studio, [Celmins] drew without touching the paper with her hand, gridding her source photographs and working from the lower right to the upper left.

Never using an eraser, always maintaining this purity of process, she left her paper immaculate, almost unmarked by evidence of human intention. The ocean is pure energy, pure movement, but depicting movement isn't central to these pictures. Celmins wasn't interested in depictions, nor was she interested in beauty. She was interested in forms so large that you don't have to think about them, you just have to believe in them".

Tomkins disagreed: "What struck me, seeing them together, was their variety. Although in a sense they were all the same - gray images of water, never a real disturbance or a wave - each had its own character, and held its own in galleries with eighteen-foot-high ceilings. I could sort of see what Celmins had meant about the pencil giving more than it was willing to give, but it wasn't just the pencil.

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What makes her images so alive is the consummate craftsmanship that goes into them - the hand, which knows things that the mind does not. There are no symbolic or poetic references to the eternal sea". Around the turn of the millennium, Celmins took up a new theme in her work. She said of the cobweb, "[it is] an image that's very, very fragile, and implies something maybe more broken, more old, more tenuous [ I've been letting the cobwebs grow and am very delighted that, somehow, from the pictures in books they've come out in the real world".

Celmins has produced several images of webs always preferring to work from photographs than from nature in aquatint, mezzotint, and drypoint. With Web 1she worked with charcoal and paper: "I work the sheet with my hand, putting on charcoal in layers, and then I start taking it off with my hand, with my breath, and then with various kinds of erasers".

Straine describes how "The lines of the web are not crisply defined, appearing softly diffuse as they rise from the background, with charcoal dust clinging in places. There are brighter white areas of the web structure where there has been a more intensive use of the eraser to highlight the radiating strands of the web. The web stretches taut across the image surface, touching all four edges and creating strong diagonals across the picture plane.

It is a drawing that is both produced mechanically the electric eraser and photographic source and laboriously, physically created by hand. Numerous fine threads are visible to the eye, but the charcoal atmosphere suffuses every line with a muted, cloaked character". Curator Samantha Rippner observes further that Celmins's webs carry "no obvious signs of life or its intrinsic expressiveness are visible.

Yet we are left, ironically, to contemplate the product of a painstaking effort - by both the spider and the artist. This is because Celmins does not imbue the spider with iconographical significance, as other artists have done. She takes a more pragmatic approach, identifying with it as a fellow builder of structures that, although possessing an inherent constancy, are each subtly different".

Celmins herself mused, "Maybe I identify with the spider. I'm the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the same image again the next day". Beginning inCelmins's School Slates series saw her return to her previous pursuit of transforming objects through a process of "redescribing". Celmins arrived at the idea of the school writing slate having come across the original item which dated back to the 19 th century while browsing items a secondhand store in Sag Harbor, Long Island.

What she called this "handsome, complicated, beautiful thing" brought memories flooding back from the artist's own childhood and she duly set about collecting other school tablets. From these, Celmins created a series of meticulously studied replicas. Blackboard Tableau 6 saw her present her simulacrum alongside the original slate. In addition to its autobiographical dimensions, Blackboard Tableau 6 tempts her audience to grapple with the idea of artistic authenticity and the relationship between the ordinary world and the more discerning tastes of the contemporary art world.

Its scratches and scuffs, however, refute the notion that the past can be easily erased". Artist Joran Kantor concludes, "The powerful image of the blank slate is so persistent in part because it is adaptable to almost any situation, era, or agenda. This doesn't mean starting anew is a useless or ignoble goal". Kantor asks, finally rhetorically?

Her father, Arturs, was a bricklayer, her mother, Milda, a homemaker and local child carer.

Vija celmins biography of christopher walken: Christopher Walken in Communion ().

Following the Soviet occupation of the country inthe family fled to Germany in where they survived several months of incessant bombing by the Allies. Celmins said on this period of continued displacement, "My biggest nightmare was losing hold of my mother's hand, and never seeing her again". Inthe Celmins family seized the opportunity to emigrate to the United States through the help of the Church World Service.

The Celmins spent their first three months in New York City. They were lodged in a hotel where the young Vija learnt her first words in English through the American comic books Arturs bought her to help pass the time. The family then moved to a permanent home in Indianapolis, Indiana Celmins mused later,"It wasn't until I was ten years old and living in Indiana that I realized being in fear wasn't normal".

Art Institute of Chicago. Archived from the original on 25 June The Modern. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Archived from the original on 12 August National Gallery of Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Archived from the original on 27 February Smithsonian Institution. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 23 May Baltimore Museum of Art.

Archived from the original on 27 July Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 21 January Archived from the original on 22 March High Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 25 January Carnegie Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 21 December Archived from the original on 19 July Centre Pompidou.

Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Celmins was born in Riga, Latvia, in and immigrated to the United States with her family in the late s. In the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia organized the first retrospective of her work. We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy available on request. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails.

Accessed January 21, View the full Getty record. Vija Celmins Ocean Surface Vija Celmins Untitled 6 Vija Celmins Ocean Surface Woodcut Vija Celmins Untitled Tree and night sky Vija Celmins Untitled Sequoia and "moon" Vija Celmins Untitled Saturn