Iconic Reference Seen in Art Work to the Fleeting Moments of Life and the Vanity of Material Goods

"For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the side by side generation'south advocacy."

one of thirteen

"Visualise what you desire to exercise before you do information technology. Visualisation is then powerful that when y'all know what you desire, y'all will go it."

2 of xiii

"What makes for great art is the courage to speak and write and paint what you know and care about."

3 of xiii

"At Cooper Marriage I became a wild Abstract Expressionist. I went dwelling house with my little sketchbook, and I copied every Old Master: Tintoretto, El Greco."

iv of 13

"Farb Family Portrait is the commencement piece of work that was ever done from a slide. Of anyone, I think I was the first photorealist that would projection the slide."

5 of 13

"The fascination of photorealist paintings lies partly in their apparent replication of life, but these are non simply replications. These paintings are often out of life calibration, varying from over life-size to under life-size, from bright heightened color to pale, undertone hues."

6 of 13

"I believe in the free energy of art, and through the use of that energy, the artist'due south ability to transform his or her life, and by example, the lives of others."

vii of 13

"Art is a protest against decease."

8 of thirteen

"I'm identifying with Mary, whose crying for her kid. And I'm crying for mine - She was the vehicle for me."

9 of 13

"Making art is virtually making choices. At that place are a surprising number to be made even when you are contemplating something as simple every bit an apple. An apple may be ruby or dark-green, or yellowish or diverse mixtures. Information technology tin be rotting or fresh, sliced or whole, pure or scarred. Information technology can be the apple tree Eve presented to Adam, Snow White'south apple tree, Red Riding Hood'southward apple, the BIG apple. You lot can see how the form and meaning modify with each i of these decisions."

x of 13

"Fine art is a powerful force in the globe. Information technology is the visual representation of what we think and what nosotros experience, and of how nosotros think and how nosotros experience."

11 of 13

"Spanish sculpture of the 17^th century is all nearly passion and extreme feelings, in other words, backlog. The 17^th century marble sculptor Berruguete as well as the wood carvers like Martinez Montanez and Luisa Roldan intensified expression, added content, color, symbolism, gold, pearls, jewels."

12 of 13

"I want my work to be universal."

13 of 13

Summary of Audrey Flack

Following an early, and insufficiently successful, flirtation with Abstruse Expressionism, Audrey Flack turned to figurative self-portraiture, a change in direction that was a response in role to challenging personal circumstances. Once her domestic state of affairs had improved, however, Flack moved away from the 'cocky' and addressed herself to the object world using the copying, tracing, and enlarging methods associated with the aesthetics of Photorealism. Flack'due south new-found success was such that she became a highly revered and established figure inside the art institution. But rather than effort and repeat her greatest triumphs, Flack turned to sculpture as a ways of exploring issues of history and female representations, chiefly through the iii-dimensional figure of the classical goddess. Latterly she has returned to two-dimensional piece of work using painting and printmaking in her quest to rework the heroic - post-modern - female figure.

Accomplishments

• Moving away from the large-scale gestural abstractions that marked the very ancestry of her career, Flack turned to narrative subject affair via a series of authentic self-portraits. Having formally studied anatomical art, Flack took her pb from no less a figure than Rembrandt, producing what were unadorned self-examinations typically realized, like Rembrandt, through sombre, earthy tones.
• Every bit she moved into Photorealism, Flack turned her gaze onto the outside world. She achieved the photo-real effect by projecting, tracing, and re-coloring real historical events onto over-size canvases. She also produced Vanitas works - traditionally nevertheless-life paintings featuring religious and moral symbolism - through which she brought iconic photographic images from the past into new relationships with everyday perishables and chattels. Flack would often use an airbrush as a ways of bringing the burnished gleam of advertising to her discipline matter thus lending her art a dramatic, hyperrealistic quality.
• Turning her attentions to 3-dimensions, Flack used sculpture as a means of exploring ideas effectually the politics of female representation. Her new female icons were typically based on ancient mythology - Medusa (1989) and Sofia (1995) for instance - merely reimagined past Flack for the post-modern age. She brought her figures into the contemporary sphere through many self-witting and kitsch allusions to pop culture. Her sculptures contested the idea of mythical and archetypal representations of women past making her figures instantly relatable for contemporary spectators.

Biography of Audrey Flack

Audrey Flack was born in Washington Heights, New York in 1931 into a middle-class family. Her parents were Eastern-European emigres and, so she would go a successor to the Jewish tradition and culture, young Audrey was taught Hebrew and attended Jewish camp during the summertime holidays. At inferior loftier school, nevertheless, Flack was a restless and confusing student and every bit punishment she was often sent to a desk in the corridor where she was given pencils and newspaper to go on her occupied. Somewhat ironically, it was through her expulsions from class that she discovered her vocation. Flack had found a sense of purpose in fine art and she duly graduated to "class artist" making calendars and fine art displays for the schoolhouse. On a more personal level, Flack had become so entranced by the swimmer-cum-actress Esther Williams that she fabricated a diorama in her heroine'south honor. Her admiration for iconic female figures would serve her well in her afterward career as well.

Important Art by Audrey Flack

Progression of Art

1951

Abstruse Force: Homage to Franz Kline

At the beginning of her career, Flack became immersed in the Abstract Expressionist movement. While withal a educatee at New York'southward Cooper Union, Flack joined the Artists Social club in Greenwich Hamlet, becoming one of a select grouping of women to become directly involved in the Abstract Expressionist scene. Her expressive, however ordered, paintings captured the movement'south zeitgeist and the brave creative spirit that lay behind her early paintings was widely acclaimed. Most influential among her early on supporters was the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers. Information technology was he who persuaded Flack to have up a scholarship at Yale with the mission of shaking upwardly the establishment's stuffy bookish reputation. Although her studies would lead her away from abstraction toward realism, the principles of structure and form in her early paintings would stay with her throughout her career.

Flack once recalled a conversation she had had with Franz Kline who she questioned on his blackness and white abstractions: "I remember saying to him in one case, 'How about using color?' Because I dear his work. He... said, 'Maybe yellowish. Yeah, maybe I'll apply yellow.'" Abstract Force and so becomes a response to that conversation: an homage to Kline'south blackness and white abstractions to which she brings her own preference for vibrant color (with yellow hues). Flack accomplished this gestural abstraction through a serial of wide, angular brushstrokes that form a tight, grid-similar structure across the film plane. The prototype does non only invoke Kline nevertheless. Ane sees here Flack's stated admiration for the likes of Picasso, Braque and Gris who sally as a secondly reference to the Cubist technique of deconstructing symmetrical patterns.

Oil on sail - Collection Norman and Sherry Bunin, New York

1958

Self Portrait (The Retentiveness)

In this intimate cocky-portrait Flack paints her own image with muted, sombre tones and anxious, agitated brush marks. With one mitt on her hip and the other jutting frontwards she appears confident with her identity equally an artist. Gazing outwards at the viewer, she has a contemplative expression. Between 1952 and 1960 Flack painted a series of self-portraits which borrowed their sombre tone from Rembrandt'due south work. We find this connection not only in the bailiwick matter but in the utilise of earthy colors too. Elements of Flack'due south previous expressionist style had by now adult into narrative, figurative subject field matter, which she painted by looking into a mirror. Her numerous portraits of the time document a journey of artistic and personal exploration. This painting - subtitled The Retentiveness - was made just after Flack's father had died. In painting her own image Flack subverts the traditional male person/female role of voyeur/muse by performing both, her aim beingness to suspension with the stereotypical prototype of the glamorous 1950s American woman.

Oil on canvas - Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio

1964

Kennedy Motorcade

John and Jackie Kennedy are seen here leaving Dallas airport on November 22, 1963, just moments before his bump-off. Flack wrote: "People were horrified at the subject area thing. Everybody is smile, and, of grade, yous know that one moment later Kennedy is going to get shot.'" The couple sit in the dorsum of a convertible car surrounded by security and airdrome staff, waiting to make their sick-blighted parade through downtown Dallas. Flack reproduced this scene from a color newspaper photograph of the Kennedys published at the fourth dimension. Defenseless squinting in the glare of the Texan sunday, the Kennedy'southward, accompanied by state governor John Connally, appear relaxed and happy, unaware of the momentous tragedy (and historical event) which is about to unfold.

Close inspection reveals the potential for a sinister reading of the image; Connally's hand is seen slipping inside his jacket while an ominous shadow is cast across John Kennedy'due south trunk. Flack was ane of many artists who moved beyond the introspection of abstraction towards the re-staging of popular imagery and civilisation. However, in the 1960s, and fifty-fifty in the wake of Pop Fine art, it was even so considered divisive for 'proper' artists to directly copy photographs. Whatever one's view on the meaning of 'original' art. Audrey Flack's Kennedy Motorcade ranks every bit an innovative case of a Photorealist style that invites the spectator to reflect on the very ontology of art. On a personal level, meanwhile, Photorealism allowed Flack the freedom to button beyond the confines of her own life story and to wait outward into the wider globe for thematic stimulus.

Oil on canvas - Private Drove

1977

Marilyn (Vanitas)

In Flack's still-life, Marilyn Monroe is remembered in what could be a shop-window memorial. The ii Marilyn portraits are black and white and, like the childhood photograph of Audrey and her blood brother that sits between them, the photographs sharply contrast with the intense colors that saturate the other objects that make up the shrine. Backside the two portraits of the Hollywood icon, we encounter a page from a biography that tells of Marilyn's sexual cocky-sensation and how, moreover, through the 'ability' of make-up a woman could "paint oneself into an musical instrument of ane's own will". Given the faded monochrome photographs, the melting candle, the draining hourglass and the over-ripened fruit, Flack's Marilyn possess a symbolic lament to the waning of memory and very possibly the loss of innocence.

Flack took her inspiration from the 17^thursday century Vanitas tradition, where the however life is composed of objects that chronicle to the fleeting 'vanities' of life. Red lipstick, powder, perfume and jewellery can exist read, on the one paw, as emblems of Marilyn's public persona only they deed also as universal symbols that speak of the superficial and fragile nature of vanity. Flack's Vanitas are brought into the 20^th century through the introduction of modern day objects and photographic imagery, producing what she termed "narrative still lifes". These images are painted with a level of exaggerated realism (or hyperrealism): the various textures of frail rose petals, shiny fruit and transparent glass meticulously copied here from still-life photographs, taken by her neighbor and erstwhile colleague Jeanne Hamilton, of Flak'southward own studio arrangements. The use of the airbrush to produce rich, sparkling veneers were very unique and thus career-defining and helped secure Flack her rightful place among the leading Photorealists of the 1970s.

Oil over acrylic on canvas - University of Arizona Fine art Museum, Tucson

1977-78

World War Two (Vanitas)

In some other of her Vanitas, Flack addresses the connected questions of memory, the Holocaust and the friability of human life. Rather than a Hollywood icon (Marilyn), this fourth dimension Flack places her objects around a reproduction of Margaret Bourke-White's famous black and white photograph of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp liberation of 1945. Bourke-White's image forms the properties for a selection of juxtapositions featuring ephemeral and permanent emblems, while the text, at the bottom of the frame, is reproduced from Jewish religious teachings. Like the pocket-watch at the summit of the frame, the organic items - a rose, decaying fruit, cake, a butterfly, and a burning candle (maybe a memorial or yahrzeit candle) - represent the impermanence of this earth. The permanent, luxury, items - silverware and pearls - are drawn rather from Flack's personal possessions and these lend the image its basis in Jewish civilisation and relate, indeed, to Flack's own religious and personal background.

It was not the fashion amongst post-modernists to fully explain their art, but of Globe War Ii Flack suggested that the red candle was intended every bit "a memorial to span fourth dimension between 1945 and the present, to burn always in the present". Indeed, Flack utilizes modern technology and work methods in the service of centuries-old creative concerns and subject affair: making momento-mori ('Recall you, too, volition dice') for the mail-modernistic era. This painting ultimately speaks of contrasts, of decease, of life, and even of beauty simply its constant bulletin is 1 of resilience and survival.

Oil over acrylic on canvas - Individual Collection

1987

Islandia, Goddess of the Healing Waters

Islandia is a v foot sculpture of a winged pagan goddess. We see that her right hand is triumphantly raised, while her left is outstretched, and her right leg, bent in contrapposto, gives Islandia a classical, strident quality. On Islandia'south head sits a crown of roses, repeated in the peaceful floral offering in her outstretched manus. Opulent gilt drapery falls from her hips and over her bent knee, recalling perhaps the Venus de Milo, while iridescent wings owe a debt to the Nike of Samothrace. These historical references coexist with Islandia's modern jewellery and the figure's dramatic surfaces.

Flack had abandoned painting by this phase in her career, choosing instead to focus on a series of goddess sculptures that could represent modern femininity - through defiant, stiff and contained female deities - in all its progressive forms. In realizing her goal, Flack delicately subverted various classical fine art conventions ranging from aboriginal mythology through to Victorian Neoclassicism. She envisioned the grapheme of Islandia - her ain creation - equally a shamanistic effigy with powers of healing: a goddess who rules a tranquil utopian matriarchal isle with profound benevolence. Flack has in fact made several sculptures based on the character, including one permanently installed in the New York Metropolis Technical College in Brooklyn, where students will rub her genu for good luck. Speaking of her sculptures in Fine art in America, writer Patricia Mathews observed that "Flack merges the symbolist trappings of the idealised female with the unmistakeable allusions to contemporary adult female, using gendered symbols, self-conscious poses and emblems of popular civilization".

Polychromed and gilded plaster - Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida

Influences and Connections

Influences on Creative person

Influenced by Creative person

• 

  Franz Kline

• Margaret Ponce

• Jeanne Hamilton

Useful Resource on Audrey Flack

Books

websites

manufactures

video clips

Content compiled and written by Rosie Lesso

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added past Antony Todd

"Audrey Flack Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written past Rosie Lesso
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd
Bachelor from:
First published on 09 Aug 2018. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

trombleythicurs.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/flack-audrey/

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