Month: October 2016

Inuit-ive Art

avidogLeave a comment

I am cold all the fucking time.  So, the thought of being born in an igloo in Canada’s Northwest Territories makes me cringe.  But for Kenojuak Ashevak, badass lady and Inuit artistic ground-breaker, it was just fine.  She was born in 1927 on Baffin Island.  Her father made his living by hunting and trading in furs.  He was also a shaman.  Pretty cool.  Ashevak’s grandmother, who she lived with as a girl, taught her many of the traditional Inuit crafts.  When Ashevak was 19, she got married.  She had many children (16!), both adopted and biological, but lost seven of them to diseases.  Ashevak herself was hospitalized for three years starting in 1950 for tuberculosis.  In 1959, she and other artists from Cape Dorset, Canada started the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, which offered workshops and classes for all kinds of artists.  In 1963, the National Film Board of Canada made a documentary about her and her art.  In the decades that followed, Ashevak received honorary doctorates, earned a place on the Canada Walk of Fame (the first Inuit to do so), was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.  Ashevak passed away in 2013 from lung cancer.

ashevakportrait

Ashevak worked in a variety of mediums: drawing (in graphite, pens, colored pencils), etching (including copper-etching and sugar-lift etching), stone carving, beadwork, and print-making.  Over the course of her life, she created thousands of works.  Her drawings have been on Canadian stamps and coins.  She has done multiple murals and did the first Inuit-designed stained-glass window for the John Bell Chapel in Ontario.  She exhibited her work in Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec.  Ashevak’s art is in collections all across Canada, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.  In 2015, Ashevak’s “Rabbit Eating Seaweed” sold for $59,000.  She even had her very own Google Doodle in 2014.

ashevakrabbit

Ashevak’s work is beautiful and vibrant.  Her subjects are the beings and places that surrounded her: owls, rabbits, Inuit people, wolves, and fish.  Although it may seem like her subjects are simple, the works are quite complex and striking.  Ashevak drew on her heritage and her land to share her world with us and we are all lucky that she did.

ashevakbird

Back to the Futurism

avidogLeave a comment

A lot can happen in a lifetime, even when that lifetime is only 32 years long.  Russian artists at the beginning of the 20th Century witnessed massive amounts of upheaval.  1914 marked the start of the First World War.  Russia allied with Britain and France against Germany and Austria-Hungary.  This violent conflict ended in 1918.  In 1917, the Tsarist rule was overthrown in the Russian Revolution and a Communist government took over, eventually placing Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in power.  Civil war followed.  The Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1922.  That’s a lot of shit for 8 years.

rozanovaportrait

Olga Rozanova was born in a village in Russia in 1886.  In 1904, she moved to Moscow and studied at K. Bolshakov’s and Konstantin Yuon’s art studios.  She also attended the Stroganov School of Applied Art.  Her art was seen in exhibitions in St. Petersburg starting in 1911.  Rozanova was very interested in Italian Futurism.  She became friends with many of the Russian Futurist poets of the time and married one of them, Aleksei Kruchenykh. She illustrated her husband’s books of poetry starting in 1912.   Her work was seen in Rome in 1914.  In 1916, Rozanova worked at the Verbovka Village Folk Center along with many other Russian artists.  Also in 1916, Rozanova joined Supremus, a group of avant-garde artists led by Kazimir Malevich.  But her art soon grew beyond Futurism and Suprematism, becoming more and more abstract, and utilizing more vibrant colors. She did a series of paintings that reinterpreted playing cards.

rozanovacard

As the country transformed, so did Rozanova’s artwork.  By 1917 and 1918, Rozanova’s paintings, which she called tsv’etopis’, were completely abstract and non-objective.  Rozanova died in 1918 from diphtheria, a bacterial infection that destroys the tissues in the respiratory system.  Diphtheria is pretty fucking gnarly and even with treatment 1 in 10 infected patients die.  Without treatment, that the mortality rate is 1 in 2.  Thank goodness there is a vaccine that prevents the disease.  At least until the anti-vaxers decide that the mumps and whooping cough are passé and need a new disease to bring back into the mix.  Get your kids vaccinated, for fuck’s sake.  Olga Rozanova would approve.  Shit, she’d be first in line.

rozanovapainting

Rozanova had two posthumous exhibitions: one in Moscow in 1919 and one at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2007 that featured her artwork and documents.  Despite her short life, Rozanova’s art explored key artistic movements of the 21st century and her abstract work was beautiful and revolutionary.  Tumultuous times makes for great art and Olga Rozanova certainly made some wonderful, kick-ass art.