Wendy Artin, Casa del Bracciale d’Oro, White Bird Alighting, 10″x14″, watercolor, 2023
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•LIVIA’S GARDEN•
FRESCOES AND FIGUREs
November 2023, Gurari Collections, Boston
Rome-based, Boston-born artist Wendy Artin brings the past to life with her new collection of radiant watercolours based on frescoes from Classical Rome. Complimenting the dense paintings of ancient gardens are light, almost abstract, sanguine nudes of female figure models.
Wendy Artin, Octopus, Eel, Lobster, Fish, 40″x45″, watercolor, 2023
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At the heart of the show, chirping colourful birds play in the 1st century BC frescoes of gardens inspired by the Villa of Livia, housed at the Museo Nazionale Romano di Palazzo Massimo in Rome. Packed with fragmented layers of color and shallow perspectives, the painted gardens feel ancient yet contemporary.
Wendy Artin, Livia’s Garden Blue Washy, 7″x11″, watercolor, 2023
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“Livia’s garden is a soft and wild paradise. Surrounding myself with painted nature has been lovely, challenging and liberating,” said Artin. “But frescoes are made with opaque paint, often with light forms on top of a dark background, which you cannot do with transparent watercolors. I tried to make my paintings as beautiful as the frescoes that inspired them, but different, allowing the watercolor to flow as celestial washes of Mediterranean skies, touched by ancient ochres.”
Theatrical masks float in the precisely painted landscape frescos of Pompeii’s House of the Golden Bracelet, with exotic birds flying over a background of blue sky or perching in thick foliage. An octopus grapples with a spiny lobster and an eel in a 2nd century AD fresco, also from Palazzo Massimo.
Wendy Artin, Federica Curving Back, 9″x11″, watercolor, 2023
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“Making my way through Palazzo Massimo to the Livia’s Garden room, instead I found myself riveted by a fresco of an octopus, spiny lobster and eel and had to paint them first, wrestling, tangled, fragmented. These antique frescoes were inside peoples’ homes, sometimes in dining rooms, meant to absorb you, entertain you, transport you. They look exactly like Italy, exactly like what you see in the countryside around Rome, same birds, same plants,” said Artin. “Age and erosion mean there are birds missing here and there, or just the outline of a leaf, like a fossil. Absence and presence is a theme I have worked with for many years.”
Wendy Artin, Bracciale d’Oro, White Bird Alighting, 10″x14″, watercolor on paper, 2023
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Artin’s long-term models move, tumble and roll in her new series of life paintings. The models’ movements are suspended in paint as the flow of water evaporates on the white paper, as illusionary and captivating as the menageries of Ancient Rome. The white paper against the vermillion bodies echoes the absences etched by age in the Classical frescos.
Wendy Artin, Federica Stretch, 7″x11″, watercolor, 2023
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Wendy Artin is the Fine Arts winner of the 2023 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition awarded by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA). Her figures appear printed on silk in the latest Collection by Attersee. She studied in the Museum School in Boston and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
The show of 55 watercolor paintings will be available at the Gurari Collections gallery and online.
Wendy Artin, watercolors of ancient frescoes, 2023