BROAD STROKES Painting

"In the winter of 1931, a thirty-year-old painter named Alice Neel was strapped with restraints to a thin mattress in Philadelphia’s orthopedic hospital. Institutionalized by her parents, Neel was raving, incontinent, and suicidal. She would become, arguably, the greatest American portraitist of the twentieth century, but was now forbidden by doctors to draw or make art of any kind. Art, the medical establishment believed, was too unsettling for a lovely young blonde like Alice Neel. She was instructed to sew instead. Neel hated sewing. She was kept to a strict institutional schedule like a prisoner: awakened for 5 a.m. breakfast, to be eaten with a rubber fork, followed by long days in barred rooms where she was ever watched by some figure of authority. Quite literally maddening for any artist, whose job it is to be observer, not observed. But Neel needed watching. Released from the hospital, she strode into her parents’ kitchen her first night home and stuck her head in their oven. Her brother found her there not quite dead in the morning (first thinking it was his mother’s legs flung across the linoleum). While her father complained about the coming gas bill, Neel was bundled back to the suicide ward. There she tried swallowing shards of broken glass, then throwing herself down a laundry chute, then auto-asphyxiation by stocking. Nothing worked. 'I couldn’t pull long enough or hard enough,' she said. 'You cannot commit suicide unless you—in a moment of frenzy—you do something irrevocable.' She never did, at least not in the sense of suicide. Neel’s irrevocable act was to paint and never stop." "As a baby art historian, I was taught that the very essence of my training was in cultivating an unerring sense of connoisseurship. Um, what? Basically: knowing who made what, just by looking at it. To be able to perceive, by attitude, gesture, mood, and style, what belongs to whom. A lofty goal. Daunting. But when I got into grad school in New York at an old-world bastion of connoisseurship training, I believed such power would someday be mine." "That Krasner was not conventionally attractive is often remarked on. Her biographer, Levin, who knew Krasner, writes, 'I never considered Lee ugly, as several of her contemporaries and some writers have emphasized since her death.' But Levin does go on at length about Krasner’s great figure, even quoting a fellow female student at the Academy describing 'the extremely ugly, elegantly stylized Lee Krasner. She had a huge nose, pendulous lips, bleached hair in a long, slick bob, and a dazzlingly beautiful, luminously white body.' Ever notice how no one ever talks about how Picasso wasn’t good-looking? He wasn’t. And he was short (5 ft 4 in/162 cm). Why does this never enter into accounts of his life and work? Because it doesn’t matter. Right? And never, that I can recall, has anyone begun a discussion of Jackson Pollock’s work with a phrase such as, 'The bald but still virile painter…'" "Judith Leyster. Born 1609 to a non-artistic Dutch family. Obtained her artist training from no one knows who. But by age twenty she’d painted her Self-Portrait, a precocious display of obvious mastery. Dressed in high style in a corseted wine-colored dress, accented with a most unsuitable projecting collar and matching white lace cuffs, Leyster is glorious in attire, and in attitude. She turns casually toward us, painting arm balanced atop a pokey-looking chair finial. Her mouth is slightly open as if to speak, and the start of a sly smile says she’s up to something. There is at least one joke in the painting. As New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has pointed out, Leyster’s paintbrush, held with assurance in her beautifully rendered right hand, aims directly at the crotch of the merry fiddler on her canvas. Deep meaning? Or a near-adolescent’s bawdy humor? Maybe a little of both. In the phrase of my friend art historian Mark Trowbridge, ‘This pipe is not just a pipe’ (that’s a Magritte pun, for those keeping art history score at home). Whatever it means, the whole painting feels lively and a little naughty. It makes me hope that if I’d been twenty in 1620s Haarlem, Judy Leyster and I would’ve hung out." "Bell’s women and children by the sea predicts, maybe even partly inspired, Virginia Woolf’s literary masterpiece To the Lighthouse. The novel grapples with the sisters’ real childhood experience seaside with multiple siblings, an overbearing father, and a warm, capable mother who dies too soon. The Stephen family spent summers in St. Ives looking onto Godrevy Lighthouse, a singular verticality on the horizontal plane of the sea. One of the novel’s main characters, Lily Briscoe, is a painter who suffers outward criticism and inward uncertainty, but who in the end prevails. Hers are the novel’s final words: 'With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush, I have had my vision.'" "Moir was a formidable presence, bigheaded, bearded, and curly haired, as classical and timeless looking as Laocoön (look it up). But he was also charming, earnest, and funny. I couldn’t wait to drop my good news about going to New York. I finally did it, in some ham-handed look at me gesture. Instead of heaping on praise, as every other person in the know had done, Moir pushed back his chair and crossed his big arms. ‘The Institute, huh?’ I nodded, awaiting congratulations. Moir nodded back. ‘You know the problem with connoisseurship?’ I did not. I had no idea there was a problem with connoisseurship. ‘It doesn’t take into account the artist waking up on the wrong side of the bed.’ He leaned forward and lifted a finger, as if to shake it in my face. ‘It doesn’t consider the really shitty day.’ Years later, when I’d discover that Moir had been one of the first Caravaggio scholars to champion Artemisia Gentileschi, I’d think, ‘Yeah! That’s my guy!’ I was team Moir from that afternoon on. I never forgot it: The Really Shitty Day. Later it would occur to me, what about the opposite? The Day When Everything Goes Right. The Fucking Excellent Day." from 'Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order)' (2017) Written by Bridget Quinn. With Cover Artwork by Lisa Congdon. Historically, major women artists have been excluded from the mainstream art canon. Aligned with the resurgence of feminism in pop culture, Broad Strokes offers an entertaining corrective to that omission. Art historian Bridget Quinn delves into the lives and careers of 15 brilliant female artists in text that's smart, feisty, educational, and an enjoyable read. Replete with beautiful reproductions of the artists' works and contemporary portraits of each artist by renowned illustrator Lisa Congdon, this is art history from 1600 to the present day for the modern art lover, reader, and feminist. From the Introduction: "At a cocktail party not long ago, a friend asked what I was working on. I’m writing about artists I love, I said happily. 'Which artists?' She asked, grinning and sipping her cocktail. I imagine she pictured a fierce Mission muralist or half-naked performance artist. I got no further than a single word - Baroque - when she lowered her drink. 'The worst class I took in college was art history,' she said. 'So. Boring.' 'Maybe you had the wrong teacher,' I said, about to add a titillating art historical tidbit when she caught sight of something more interesting over my shoulder and moved on. It strikes me that we might need a little caveat here before getting started. Can we agree at the outset to lay down our qualms about Ye Olde Arte Hystore at the door of this book? Put them down. Walk away. Let us agree that together we shall fear no corsets, nor nursing saviors, nor men in top hats and cravats, nor vast expanses of peachy dimpled thighs. Let us withhold judgment until we know more." Source: amazon.com Bridget Quinn is author of the books She Votes: How U.S. Women Won Suffrage, and What Happened Next, an Amazon Editors’ pick for Best History books 2020, and the award-winning Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order), an Amazon pick for Best Art & Photography Books 2017 and a 2018 Amelia Bloomer List selection of recommended feminist literature from the American Library Association. Translated into four languages, in 2018 Broad Strokes was a national finalist for best art book of the year in Ukraine. NPR’s Susan Stamberg calls it “a terrific essay collection” with “spunky attitudinal, SMART writing,” marking the second time “attitudinal” has been used about her work (first: Kirkus 1996). Raised on the high plains of Montana with six brothers, two sisters, a devout and sporty mother and a WWII Marine-turned-lawyer father, in a home surrounded by cows and nuclear missile silos, she’s lived since in Norway, New York, Oregon and California. She’s taught art history, history and writing for more than two decades; worked in museums and for galleries and private collections; worked at climbing gyms on both coasts, and was a researcher for the first several ESPN X Games, covering rock climbing, ice climbing, BMX freestyle and downhill mountain biking. A graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a regular contributor to online arts magazine Hyperallergic, she’s a nationally sought-after speaker on women and art. She’s a longtime member of that divine Bay Area collective, The Writers Grotto, and former co-host of The GrottoPod: Writers on Writing. An avid sports fan and Iron(wo)man triathlete, her Narrative magazine essay “At Swim, Two Girls” was included in The Best American Sports Writing 2013. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family, dogs, and too many bikes. Source: bridgetquinnauthor.com Illustrator, fine artist and author Lisa Congdon is best known for her colorful, graphic drawings and hand lettering. Lisa works for clients around the world including Method, Target, Comme des Garçons, Crate and Barrel, Facebook, MoMA, REI, and Harvard University among many others. She is the author of nine books, including Art Inc: The Essential Guide to Building Your Career as an Artist; Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic; and her latest book, You Will Leave a Trail of Stars: Inspiration for Blazing Your Own Path. Lisa teaches in the Applied Craft & Design MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Source: lisacongdon.com

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:72 W x 72 H x 2.5 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.