BCD#28

Blind Contour Homage #28 – “Sweet Peas” 1911 – Edith Hester McDonald

Thanks to a frustrating tangle of social, historical, and geographical circumstances, very little is known about the African-Canadian artist, Edith Hester McDonald.

Born in Nova Scotia in 1880, McDonald may have attended art school in Montreal before returning home, where she married William Brown. Because her works are signed “Edith McDonald,” it is generally believed she painted them before marriage.

However, although she must have created many pieces, few survive. The rest fell victim to the racist policies inflicted upon her community, Africville. A neighbourhood founded in the mid-1800s on the outskirts of Halifax and populated predominantly by African-Canadians (many of whom settled in Nova Scotia after escaping slavery south of the border), Africville suffered for decades from deficient infrastructure. According to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), the City of Halifax denied requests from the residents of Africville for clean water, appropriate sewage systems, and garbage removal. Yet, despite their social and political neglect, Africville was a thriving and close-knit community, building together a school, church, and shops.

But in 1964, the City of Halifax decided to take Africville’s land for its own development. Claiming interest in Africville’s health and living standards, it forced all residents to relocate to different neighbourhoods across Halifax. Some home-owners were paid for the price of their house; most were forced out with little or no compensation, all while their homes were bulldozed and their sense of community was torn apart.

Sunday Miller, the Executive Director of the Africville Heritage and Trust, explained to Mallory Richard (a blogger for the CMHR), that the citizens of Africville had tried “to create a community that the government wasn’t willing for them to have. When they took them off this land and forced them to be a ward of the government, which is what happened for those who went into social housing, you took their dignity from them.”

Dignity was not the community’s only casualty. While some of its artifacts remain—displayed in the Africville Museum—many were destroyed, including all but four of McDonald’s paintings. In fact, hardly anyone even knew that McDonald’s art existed until David Woods, artistic director of the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia (BANNS), curated the 1998 exhibition In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia. Through his own “door to door” research, he uncovered McDonald’s work in an effort to counter the widely held assumption that Nova Scotia doesn’t “have any black art.”

The only McDonald painting ever to be exhibited is Sweet Peas (1911), a still life of a vase of flowers, but it has gone missing. (Update: Feb 13, 2024: Sweet Peas has been found at the Mont St Vincent University, Halifax, NS.) McDonald’s granddaughter, Geraldine Parker, now holds the four extant paintings—one still life and three landscapes. They depict a vibrant Romantic countryside—scenes whose inspiration remains a mystery. For instance, her 1906 untitled oil painting of a herd of cattle suggests not only a rich pastoral setting, but also, perhaps, a metaphor for colonial conquest—an observation about race and power that would bear great relevance on the fate of most of McDonald’s oeuvre.

Born: 1880, Halifax, Nova Scotia
Died: 1956, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Sources:

Canadian Women Artists History Initiative: Artist Database. “McDonald, Edith Hester.” https://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=5711

Johnson, Adrienne. Through African Canadian Eyes: Landscape Painting by Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century African Canadians. MA Thesis, Concordia University, 2015.

Richard, Mallory. “The Story of Africville.” February 23, 2017. Canadian Museum for Human Rightshttps://humanrights.ca/blog/black-history-month-story-africville

Simmonds, Veronica. “Uncovering History.” The Coast, February 16, 2012. https://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/uncovering-history/Content?oid=2958695

Virtual Museum Canada. “1906: Expanding History: Edith Hester McDonald.” https://150ans150oeuvres.uqam.ca/en/artwork/1906-untitled-by-edith-hester-macdonald-brown/#description

BCD#27

Blind Contour Drawing #27 – “Riding the Sea Goddess” – Jessie Oonark

Environmental and socio-historical calamities combined to produce the conditions from which one of the most celebrated Inuit artists would emerge. Jessie Oonark, born in 1906 in Chantrey Inlet on the Arctic coast, spent the first five decades of her life travelling Nunavut with her nomadic hunter family. She married her husband Qabluunaq when she was quite young, and together they had twelve children. But their difficult living conditions—impacted by the collapse of fur prices in a declining European trade market—became untenable in the 1950s, when the caribou population dwindled. During this time, Oonark lost her husband and four children to illness and starvation.

Responding to the emergency, the Canadian government airlifted the Inuit of Chantrey Inlet to Baker Lake, where Oonark worked various odd jobs, such as cleaning and sewing. It was in Baker Lake that a visiting biologist recognized Oonark’s drawing skills—the story goes that Oonark saw some children’s drawings and, upon announcing that she could do better, accepted the challenge to prove it. The biologist gave her paper and a set of pencils. Over the next couple of years, Oonark would send her drawings to the biologist’s home in Ottawa, and he would send more art supplies. Despite her late start, Oonark quickly gained renown as an outstanding artist within the Baker Lake community, and her work was sent by other residents to the West Baffin Co-operative in Cape Dorset, where her drawings were turned into prints—an essential shift that meant wider distribution, broader recognition, and archival potentials for Oonark’s artwork.

In 1966, the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs provided Oonark with studio space and a small salary, enabling her to continue drawing, as well as to create textile arts (Oonark’s acclaimed untitled tapestry, measuring at over 22 square meters, hangs at the National Arts Centre). She gradually became recognized as among the most important and influential Inuit artists, celebrated by galleries across Canada and inducted into the Order of Canada in 1984, a year before her death in Churchill, Manitoba.

Often drawn as fragmentary forms and shaped into non-linear images, Oonark’s drawings and wall hangings consistently represent stories of shamanism and dreaming. Although Oonark didn’t practice shamanism herself, she had witnessed her father’s work as a shaman, and perhaps she used these memories to fulfill what Josephine Withers describes as the responsibility of shamans and artists “to record and give shape to the personal and collective memories of the community.” A shaman’s role is to summon spirit helpers, such as a bird, bear, walrus, or caribou, and seek guidance in the search for game. Many of Oonark’s drawings—Flight of the Shaman and A Shaman’s Helping Spirits are two examples—represent the shaman’s spiritual work.

Indeed, the significance within Oonark’s pieces is layered and complicated. They suggest multiple meanings and, from different angles, suggest new narratives. Her drawings implicitly acknowledge the mutable nature of the oral stories from which she draws, and which she intentionally alters. For instance, speaking of her piece Big Woman, Oonark notes that she changed the common version of a story about a stone woman: “This woman who is turning into a stone, in Chantrey Inlet. The Stone itself is really colourful because this woman has a fancy parka… She turned into stone… because she never wanted to get married to anybody, not anyone at all. The woman is supposed to be in a kneeling position, but I just drew it in a standing position anyway.” Here, Oonark’s remark reveals how her art resists single interpretations, so that many of her pieces have a shape-shifting quality, with non-linear narrative suggestions indicating ambiguity.

Although it has been over thirty years since Oonark’s death, her work continues to influence Inuit art produced today. All of her eight living children are also artists.

Born: 1906, Chantrey Inlet, Nunavut
Died: 1985, Churchill, Manitoba

 

Sources:

Billson, Janet Mancini and Kyra Mancini. Inuit Women: Their Powerful Spirit in a Century of Change. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Bonesteel, Sarah. “Canada’s Relationship with Inuit: A History of Policy and Program Development.” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. June 2006. https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100016900/1100100016908#chp2

Fowler Museum at UCLA. “Power of Thought: The Art of Jessie Oonark.” Press Release, February 8, 2004. https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PowerOfThought-release.pdf

“Jessie Oonark.” North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. Edited by Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller. Routledge, 1995, pp. 420.

The National, CBC Television. “A Tapestry from the Late Inuit Artist Jessie Oonark Getting New Life.” News Release. April 4, 2014. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.kpu.ca:2443/docview/1324596840/fulltext/F60F055876C943FEPQ/1?accountid=35875

National Arts Centre. “The National Arts Centre Celebrates the Return of the Magnificent Oonark Tapestry.” News Release, April 4, 2013. https://nac-cna.ca/en/media/newsrelease/6120

Withers, Josephine. “Inuit Women Artists: An Art Essay.” Feminist Studies, 1984, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 84 – 96.

BCD#29

Blind Contour Homage #29 – “Island of Rocks” – Florence McGillivray

“She was the best.” Tom Thomson on Florence McGillivray

Although relatively unknown now, Florence McGillivray was a leading Canadian artist in her time. Born to a wealthy family (her father was a Scottish immigrant with a well-situated farm in Whitby, Ontario), McGillivray’s early talent as an artist was encouraged through private lessons with esteemed southern Ontarian artists. McGillivray capitalized on this good fortune by charging 25 cents to her friends and classmates for lessons sharing what she had learned. She added to her earnings by selling her paintings in local fairs.

This youthful shrewdness characterized McGillivray’s entire career; talent, good fortune, and keen curiosity ensured that she remained abreast of leading artistic movements, figures, and techniques. Travelling to Europe in 1913, she studied in Paris’s Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, earning admiration when her painting Contentment was exhibited in the prestigious Salon des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, she was mentored and encouraged by Matisse, Simon, and Menard, and she studied “Realist, Nabis and Fauvist palettes and pictorial construction,” which she imported to Canada when she was forced home after the outbreak of World War I. Back in Ontario, she mentored Tom Thomson, who declared McGillivray one of the best painters in Canada. In fact, Katharine Lochnan (McGillivray’s great-great niece) and art historian Sarah Stanners argue that McGillivray had the single greatest influence on Thomson’s work, solving the mystery behind the European styles in Thomson’s work.

Yet, despite her connection with the Group of Seven, McGillivray’s name does not receive the same level of recognition. This oversight is due in part to her family’s wealth; her comfortable lifestyle meant she was not forced to sell her paintings. But she has also been overlooked because of her gender. Art historian Regina Haggo explains that it “was difficult for a Canadian woman to become a professional artist a hundred years ago. Women were supposed to get married, have babies and stay at home. And because McGillivray was female, her work was undervalued by critics and ignored by art historians. … Moreover, taming nature with a brush was a job for a man. Women were deemed to be intellectually incapable of painting landscape. A woman artist was expected to paint pretty images of domestic life.”

But McGillivray rejected expectations for female artists. Instead, she used “the palette knife, masses of colour, and a strong black line around forms” to develop her signature style—a method influenced by her interactions with European artists, but cultivated independently as she experimented throughout her career. Her entire life was spent seeking creative inspiration and education. Just as she painted landscapes of the Gatineau valley, Labrador, and Newfoundland, she also travelled widely abroad—to Trinidad, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Alaska, and beyond—in search of new vistas and styles. When she died in Toronto in 1938, she left behind an enormous body of work. Only in recent years has it been rediscovered and celebrated for its significant contribution to the Canadian modernist movement.

Born: 1864, Whitby, Ontario
Died: 1938, Toronto

Sources:

Allen, W.C. “Following Florence.” Gatineau Valley Historical Society. http://www.gvhs.ca/publications/utga-following-florence.html

The Florence McGillivray Project. “Florence’s Stories.” https://florencemcgillivray.ca

Haggo, Regina. “Florence McGillivray Tamed Nature with a Brush.” Hamilton Spectator, January 7, 2017. https://www.thespec.com/whatson-story/7050268-regina-haggo-florence-mcgillivray-tamed-nature-with-a-brush/

Lochnan, Katharine and Sarah Stanners. “The Group of Eight.” Canadian Art, October 10, 2017. https://canadianart.ca/features/the-group-of-eight/

Murray, Joan. Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero. Dundern Press, 1998.

Prakash, A.K. Independent Spirit: Early Canadian Women Artists. Firefly Books, 2008.

BCD#26

Blind Contour Homage #26 – “Muskoka” – Marjorie Pigott

Marjorie Pigott was born in Yokohama, Japan. Her father was English and had commercial interests in Japan. Her mother was Japanese of noble birth. Pigott and her sisters were considered British according to Japanese law which determines ones nationality based on the father. The girls received an education from an English governess until they were old enough to attend boarding schools in Britain and Japan, However Pigott was not strong enough to travel aboard. Her mother had a thorough knowledge of Japanese art and their home was filled with priceless treasures of ancient Japan, (many of which were destroyed during an earthquake in 1923). She recognized Pigott artistic talent early and sent her to study under master artists at the Nanga School, which was founded in the 15th century. After 12 years of study, she received her Seal Diploma and a Master Diploma (Teacher’s Certificate) designating her a Nanga Master. Part of her teacher’s name Shutei is on the Seal Diploma as an honour for her achievement in certain atmospheric misty effects in her paintings. Her father died when she was young and never got to witness his daughter’s accomplishments.

Because of their English nationality it was advised that the girls leave Japan as war was looming. In 1940 and at the age of 36,Pigott left with her sister Edith for Canada. They first settled in Vancouver and then moved east to Toronto because the West Coast climate was hard on Pigott’s health. For the first few years she kept active doing floral studies (many in lacquer) for a commercial firm.

Then from 1955 to 1965 she taught the Nanga technique to Japanese in Canada. This school of painting is almost abstract. Black ink is applied in skillful ways to express how the artist feels about their subject. Pigott started painting Canadian scenes, such as the landscapes around Muskoka, using the Nanga technique. She developed her own style of semi-abstract wet-into-wet watercolour painting. She painted from memory and used photos as reference of the nature around her.

Her work was shown in several solo exhibitions and group shows all over Canada. Her work is represented in the National Gallery of Canada among others. She was a member of and exhibited her work with the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour and the Ontario Society of Artists. She was also elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1973.

Born: January 06, 1904, Yokohama, Japan
Died: January 12, 1990, Toronto, Canada

BCD#25

Blind Contour Drawing #25 –
“Dishcloth on Line #3 ”
– Mary Pratt 1997

Mary Pratt grew up on one of the most well-regarded streets in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She was one of two daughters to a Harvard-educated provincial cabinet minister.

She was heavily influenced by her maternal grandmother, Edna McMurray, who was the co-founder of the first Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE) chapter in New Brunswick. Pratt, like her grandmother, served her community on several boards and communities during her lifetime, especially with matters of the arts and education.

Pratt attended Mount Allison University, studying Fine Arts under Alex Colville, Ted Pulford, and Lawren P. Harris. It was Colville who influenced the development of her style and her subsequent move toward realism. Harris was less enthusiastic. In her second year, she met the artist Christopher Pratt they married in 1957. Harris was quick to inform her that there could only be one artist in a marriage and she was not it.

Despite his forewarning, Pratt kept up with her practice even after they moved to Scotland so that her husband could attend the Glasgow School of Art. They had two children while there and even though she had very limited time, she continued to paint. They moved back to the Maritimes in 1961, to Newfoundland, Christopher’s home, had 2 more children and Pratt continued to work. The couple separated in 2004.

While she was frustrated by the lack of time she could work, she kept up with her practice by focusing on the ordinary things she found around her home in rural Newfoundland. She began to experiment with the use of light and found that she couldn’t sketch fast enough so started to take photos of mundane moments that she described as having an erotic charge. Months later, getting the slides back, she would reassess if her subject still held that special quality and only painted those moment that she loved.

This portrayal of the ordinary helped Pratt earn national recognition. She started to show her work in 1967 and by the 1970’s her focus was turned towards the everyday objects of women’s domestic lives.

In 1996, Pratt was named Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1997, she was awarded the Molson Prize for visual artists from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2013, she was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She was also awarded nine honorary degrees from various universities throughout Canada. Pratt was also the first Atlantic woman to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.

Pratt suffered severe near-sightedness, which is reflected in the focal depth of her paintings. She also found difficulty walking and using her hand by middle age because of Rheumatoid arthritis. She continued to paint until her late 70’s.

Her subject matter elevated the mundane scenes of domesticity. Pratt’s art was powerful and political. It was derived from what she called an erotic charge for the moment she captured and then painted.

Born: March 15, 1935, Fredericton, New Brunswick
Died: August 14, 2018, St. John’s, Newfoundland

BCD#24

Blind Contour Drawing #24 –
“I have spoken with this green person”
– Rachel Berman 2010

Once known as Susan King, Rachel Berman reclaimed her birth name as an adult after she successfully discovered the names and of her biological parents and her own birth story. She was born in New Orleans in 1946 and was raised by foster parents in Victoria B.C. She abandoned the foster system at an early age and lived a tough life.

She was a self taught artist and traveled and worked in the U.S., Ireland and in Canada, she eventually settled in Victoria B.C. where she grew up. She worked as a greeting card artist. Her quirky animal characters, Mooky McBeth and Vanessa Vanilla eventually became characters in children’s books. She was nominated for the Governor General’s award for English Language Children’s Literature-Illustration in 2009 and 2013.

Berman’s paintings were exhibited in many places but most frequently with The Ingram Gallery in Toronto. Her gallery paintings are hauntingly beautiful. She drew from her experiences in the streets of London, Dublin, New York, Toronto and downtown Vancouver. She never owned a camera but spent hours sketching in housekeeping rooms, worn hotel lobbies, cafes, and metro stations. The mysterious figures and hidden stories in her paintings are a reflection of the struggles and mysteries she lived through herself. She once said that her paintings were autobiographical, her search for herself.

Berman suffered from HIV and hid her illness from her loved ones for a long time. She was ashamed of her early drug addiction and lifestyle. However, she felt AIDS made her grateful: “It did give me time to think, not about what the disease has taken away from me but what it has given me, and for which I now am most grateful, for life is most generous … – I have to live today like it is the best day in the world — & I now have the wisdom to know that it is.”

She was known to deliver envelopes stuffed with drawings, philosophy, calligraphy, rambling love letters and poetry, usually by bicycle in the early hours of morning to friends, loved ones and even strangers. She was an apparition in an overcoat and described as a “quiet observer of life, a thinker and a humanist.”

Born: 1946, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Died: May 28, 2014, Victoria

BCD#23

Blind Contour Drawing #23 – “Reason over Passion” Joyce Wieland 1968

Joyce Wieland was born in Toronto in 1930. She was the youngest child of emigrants from Britain. Wieland and her 2 older brothers struggled to survive after both of their parents died when she was still in grade school. Despite being poverty stricken, she was able to study fashion design at the Central Technical high school in Toronto. It was there that she met working artists like Doris McCarthy. McCarthy was an independent spirit and committed to her art practice. She became an important mentor for Wieland.

After graduating in 1948, Wieland worked as a graphic designer. She met artist, Michael Snow at a graphics firm in Toronto. They married in 1956 and had a 20 year relationship.

Before she married, she moved into her own apartment studio, which at the time was not the common for young women. She lived alongside other artists and became part of the city’s growing boho scene. Her independent nature led her to travel and she was able to visit Europe a few times in her twenties. She began to achieve some success with her paintings in the late 1950’s and had her first solo show in Toronto in 1960.

Between 1962 and 1971, Wieland and Snow lived in New York. Feeling connected to the city’s counter culture vibe, she continued to paint but also explored other mediums. New York was teeming with pop art and conceptual art, and artists were responding to the political and cultural issues of the time, including the war in Vietnam, feminism, and environmentalism.

Wieland had learned filmmaking and animation techniques while working in commercial design, so she began to create films. In a short period of time, she was screening her work alongside her American colleagues. Her work was well received due to their political edge and wit.  In 1968 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Five Films by Joyce Wieland. Her films are known internationally.

Wieland had a healthy relationship with sex and was passionate about feminism. Much of her artwork explore these themes. Besides film and paint, she also started to work with fabric. She intentionally used fabric to express her political ideas because traditionally it had been used by women. She created quilts and mixed media pieces that challenged the notions of what is art and what is craft, what is masculine and what is feminine. She was a leader in bringing these materials and mediums into the fine art world.

On Canada Day, July 1st, 1971 the National Gallery of Canada presented her solo exhibition, True Patriot Love. It was the first time the Gallery had given a solo show to a living Canadian female artist. At that time she returned to Toronto to live and work. By the 1980’s she was focused on painting and in 1987 the Art Gallery of Ontario held a retrospective of her work.

Wieland maintained a studio practice in Toronto until her health began to decline. She was cared for by a group of female friends until her death on June 27, 1998 from Alzheimer’s disease.

Born: June 30, 1930, Toronto
Died: June 27, 1998, Toronto

BCD#22

Blind Contour Drawing #22 – “Fingal” Gillian Ayres, 2005

Gillian Ayres was born in 1930 in Barnes, London and grew up in comfort due to her family’s hat making business. She developed interest in art early and enrolled at the age of 16 in the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts.

Ayres exhibited with Young Contemporaries in 1949 and with the London Group in 1951. Her first solo show was at Gallery One, London, in 1956. The following year she was commissioned to create a large-scale mural for South Hampstead High School for Girls. It was not appreciated at the time and was quickly covered with wallpaper. Luckily it was rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition.

She met her husband, Henry Mundy at school and they married in 1951. They had two sons and eventually divorced in 1981 but remained friends and continued to live together in the same house painting in their separate studios. Mundy and many of his friends were ex-servicemen, their distain towards traditionalists suited Ayres anti-authoritarian attitude and helped her find her voice in abstraction.

Ayres’ early works were usually made with thin vinyl paint with a limited palette. She matured as an artist in the 1950s, in the heyday of “experimental art.” Her rebellious nature helped her to become one of the first British admirers of Jackson Pollock.

Her later works in oil paint are very colourful and thick with paint. Her huge canvases were often worked on in sitting-rooms and bedrooms while her bantams, peacocks, cats and dogs roamed freely from her garden to the kitchen to the studio. The marks of their paws and claws may still be detected in some paintings.

In 1957 Ayres showed at the significant exhibition Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today, at the Redfern gallery. She was the only woman in the Situation exhibition at the RBA Galleries in 1960, the first group show of British abstract art of the new decade.

Ayres worked part-time at the AIA Gallery from 1951-59 before starting to teach. She held a number of teaching positions through the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959, she was asked to teach at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, for six weeks. They asked her to stay and she remained on the teaching staff until 1965.

In 1965 she became a senior lecturer at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, she stayed there until 1978 when she became head of painting at Winchester School of Art in 1978, she was the first female teacher in the UK to this position. She left teaching in 1981, and moved north-west Wales to become a full-time painter. 1987 she relocated to the North Devon-Cornwall border where she remained for the rest of her life.

She smoked about 3 packs of cigarettes a day, worked throughout the night if she felt like it, gave money to friends, wasn’t much of a housekeeper, collected broken pieces of china and loved Elizabethan poetry. Her favourite painter was Rubens. Ayres ignored most advice, including medical and didn’t have much time for current affairs.

Ayres was one of Britain’s most significant abstract painters and has been described as courageous, independent, determined with a generous heart.

She died at the age of 88 near her beloved cottage and studio in North Devon. Her paintings and prints are held by major museums and galleries around the world.

Born: 1930, London
Died: 2018, North Devon

BCD#21

Blind Contour Drawing #21 – “Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood,” – Hilma af Klint 1907

Hilma af Klint was the fourth child of five to a Swedish naval commander and mathematician. The family spent summers at their manor on the island of Adelsö. She formed a strong connection to nature in these idyllic surroundings, which would later influence her work.

When the family moved to Stockholm, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Stockholm, where she learned portraiture and landscape painting. In 1882, by the age of 20, she was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. After graduating with honors, she was awarded a scholarship in the form of an art studio, where her landscapes and portraits became the source of income and independence. The Scandinavian education system was well ahead of the French and German systems and allowed women into their Academies. It was not uncommon for women to make a living from their art.

Af Klint’s 10 year old sister, Hermina died in 1880. The grief and the loss sparked her interest in spiritualism and religion. She began meeting with ‘The Five’, or ‘De Fem’ – a group of five of female artists who met secretly to seek communication with mystic beings. Conducting séances and creating automatic drawings, they communed regularly with these spirits they called the “High Masters.”

Her knowledge of botany, geometry, mathematics, natural sciences, world religions and her interest in spiritually accumulated in what the art world now recognizes as the first abstract paintings in history. In 1906, she was painting and working in abstraction at least 5 years earlier before Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and others would create similar moves to rid their work of representational content.

She worked in private, selling her landscapes and portraits. She did not spend time promoting herself, publishing manifestos or participating in exhibitions as her contemporaries did. Even in her old age, she did not believe the world was ready for her work and included in her will that not a single item from her over 1,200 piece estate which included paintings, drawings and writings be shown until 20 years after her death.

She passed away on October 21, 1944 in the aftermath of a traffic accident, nearly 82 years old. When she died none of her abstract works had ever been shown to the public.

Since 2013, when the Modern Museum in Stockholm hosted an exhibition dedicated solely to her work, af Klint is now generally considered to be the pioneer and inventor of abstract art. Her first abstract work was painted in 1906.

Born: October 26, 1862, Solna, Sweden
Died: October 21, 1944, Danderyd Municipality, Sweden

BCD#20

Blind Contour Drawing #20 –  “The Spanish Family”  Alice Neel, 1943

Alice Neel was born in Pennsylvania in 1900. Alice was the fourth of five children and was raised into a conservative middle-class family. Opportunities were limited for women and she remembers her mother had once said, “I don’t know what you expect to do in the world, you’re only a girl.”

After high school and while working an office job, she attended evening art classes in Philadelphia. In 1921, Neel enrolled in the Fine Art program at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She rejected impressionism, the popular style at the time, and instead embraced the Ashcan School of Realism.

During her school years, she met and later married Cuban artist Carlos Enriquez, son of prominent family in Havana. The couple lived between Cuba and New York, both painting and exhibiting. They had their first daughter in 1926, who died a year later of diphtheria. In 1928, Neel gave birth to their second daughter, Isabella. Enriquez returned to Havana with Isabella. While separated from her daughter and husband, Neel suffered emotional trauma and attempted suicide. She was hospitalized for almost a year. She never divorced her husband but remained separated from him and her daughter visited her periodically throughout her lifetime.

In 1932 she returned to Greenwich Village with her lover, Kenneth Doolittle. She enrolled in the Public Works Art Project and received a wage. She had a tormentous relationship with the PWAP because of her controversial style and subject matter. In a rage, Doolittle burnt more than three hundred of Neel’s drawings and watercolors and slashed more than fifty oil paintings at their apartment on Cornelia Street. Her friend, John Rothschild, helped her leave and he wanted to move in with her but she refused. Later that year, she met Jose Santiago Negron, a nightclub singer. He left his wife and child and moved in with Neel. The couple moved to the Spanish (East Harlem), a place that had a huge influence on her work.

In 1938 she exhibited 16 paintings in her first solo exhibition in New York City at Contemporary Arts. The following year she gave birth to a son and Negron left her. In 1939, she met Sam Brody, a photographer and filmmaker. They lived on and off together for two decades and had a son in 1941. Neel lived in Spanish Harlem for 20 years and raised her two boys there. She continued to paint even though she lived on public assistance.

Neel was never a member of the Communist Party but was a believer in socialism and sympathetic to many of the Communist ideals. She attended several protests at major art galleries for the treatment of minorities and the underrepresentation of female artists.

Neel persisted in being a figure painter and a portraitist during her career even though it was unpopular. During her lifetime, the New York scene was bursting with the new energy of abstraction but she remained faithful to her style and subject matter. She created a unique, expressive style of portrait painting that captured the psychology, sociology and personality of those living in New York, from friends and neighbors in Spanish Harlem to celebrities.

Her determination to continue to create work that pleased her finally paid off as she slowly started to gain recognition and awards for her work in the 1960’s. Prior to this time, she was virtually unknown and had only a handful of solo shows. However in the last two decades of her life, she had sixty. This was due not only to the strength of her work, but to the emerging Feminist Art movement that began to shine a light on the achievements of women artists.

Neel was an original, witnessing many art movements in her lifetime and refusing to follow any of them. She has been hailed one of the greatest portraitists of the last century. Her keen observation of each of her subjects reveals insights into the human condition and conveys an emotional intensity that creates an incredibly powerful body of work.

 

Born: 1900, Pennsylvania

Died: 1984, New York