Summer Self-Portrait

Snehal Page  "Summer Self-Portrait"  2013  

Snehal Rajeev Page (b.1984) lives and works in Pune, India. She has several degrees from Indian institutions and also studied for three years in the US at Studio Incammanati in Philadelphia. The artist paints landscape and still-life, but is perhaps best known for her figurative work. Her portraits are characterized by delicately expressive coloration, poetic restraint in composition and acute sensitivity of facial expression. Page leads workshops in color theory and portraiture and has won numerous awards including recent honors from the Art Society of India and the Art Renewal Center. The artist's website can be seen here.

Artisans

Utagawa Kunisada "Artisans"  1857  California Palace of the Legion of Honor

Artisans shows a group of women in a workshop producing woodblock prints, and is from the series A Parody of the Four Social Classes. It is a flight of fancy, because although there were some women working as ukiyo-e artists or as assistants in the workshop of well-known artists during the Edo period, it seems that women were not at that time employed to carve or print the blocks, which was considered an entirely different craft from the painting of the original image. (Women did of course assist in family-run businesses so I assume there were some exceptions.) Although this is an imaginary scene, the stages of the process are all accurately described. (Click image to enlarge!)

Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) was a prolific ukiyo-e artist of the late Edo period in Japan. During his lifetime he was by far the most popular and successful artist among his contemporaries, which included Hiroshige, Hokusai and Kuniyoshi.

Medieval Sculptor

artist unknown Le Livre des Cleres et Nobles Femmes, French, 15th C.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Florentine author Giovanni Bocaccio's book De mulieribus claris ("Of Famous Women") was first published in 1371. The book was a smash hit, and was republished all over Europe in numerous translations and editions for several centuries. This painting comes from a 15th century French version and the illustrator has dressed his or her subject in the contemporary garb of 15th Century France.

Despite an amazing amount of confusion on the topic of the role of women in the European medieval workforce, there is ample evidence that medieval women worked in the building trade as stonemasons, bricklayers, hod carriers, trench-diggers and in fact in every building job there was. A great advantage to hiring women was that they could be paid far less than men or boys for the same work. In the skilled craftsman fields it is true that women were not at every period of time and in every country allowed to be full guild members, although it appears that there was quite a lot of shifting of supposedly inflexible rules, over the centuries, and many gray areas throughout. Widows and female orphans of skilled craftsmen were indeed often allowed some level of guild membership in even the most gender-segregated countries (for example, historically, Germany had stricter rules barring women from certain professional trades than the Netherlands.)

If you'd like to read some of the latest scholarship on this topic you may read a synopsis of an article here.

Maia

Maia Zer "Big Self" 2003  private collection

Maia Zer (b.1962) is a contemporary Israeli artist. She studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv from 1984-87, and additionally was a student of Israel Hershberg. Zer also spent several years painting in Amsterdam and in Paris. The artist maintains a large art library which is important to her process and to her inspiration. She states, "I see the dialog[ue] between artists through the ages as an essential tool in my work." It seems apparent when one views her ouevre that she has spent time in serial aesthetic discussion with Antonio García López, Avigdor Arikha, Gregory Gillespie and Lucian Freud, all artists of relatively recent demise. Zer credits her influences from the more distant past as "Ingres, Holbein, Balthus and so many more.."

Maia Zer "Twisted Self"  2012  Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Maia Zer "Sunset" 2001  private collection

 Zer has exhibited her work in numerous venues including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from which she received the Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realistic Painting in 2009. The artist's website can be seen here.

Artist Painting Herself

Jean Alphonse Roehn "Portrait of an Artist Painting Her Self Portrait" 19th . C   location unknown

Jean Alphonse Roehn (1799–1864) was a French painter who was born, worked and died in Paris. He was the son of a successful genre painter Adolphe-Eugène-Gabriel Roehn (1780-1867) who was his first teacher. Jean Alphonse left his father's studio at age fourteen to study at the École des Beaux Arts, working in particular with artists Jean-Baptiste Regnault and Antoine-Jean Gros. Roehn's early efforts were full of youthful ambition for grand religious themes, but after about 1827 he abandoned this type of work and, like his father, devoted himself to genre and portraiture, with the occasional small-scale history painting thrown in for good measure. He exhibited regularly at the yearly Salon, and these works were almost exclusively pieces drawn from everyday life, for which he had an obvious talent.

~Many thanks to artist Michael Lane for bringing this piece to my attention.

Polk-a

Kathryn Polk "Real Girls Make Prints Not Pies" 2009

Printmaker Kathryn Polk (b.1952) is originally from Tennessee, where she received degrees from the Memphis Art Academy and The University of Memphis. She now lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. She is the co-owner of a professional lithography studio called L VIS Press and she is known as a trailblazer in developing and promoting less toxic lithographic procedures and equipment.

Kathryn Polk "I make Prints Not Pies" 2010

Polk exhibits widely and her work is in many collections around the world such as The National Academy of Fine Art (Hangzhou, China), University of Wales (Aberystwyth, UK), and The University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson.) More information about the artist and her work can be found on her blog, Non-Indigenous Woman,  which can be seen here. 

Kathryn Polk "Spilt Milk" 2011

Spring Self-Portrait

Cornelia Hernes "Spring Self Portrait"  2010  location unknown

Cornelia Hernes (b.1979) was born in Norway, studied art in Canada and in Italy and currently teaches in Sweden! All this globe-trotting belies the quiet and very still nature of her work, like an indrawn breath held lightly for a moment. She exhibits at Jack Meier Gallery in Houston, Texas and her website can be seen here,