03 March 2011

Art I like - Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins is now best known for her abstract images of "vast nothingness" - the surface of the sea, the night sky -
Her early work is being reconsidered in this book -
Among the early works is a "shocking array of violent imagery ... guns, riots, bullet-ridden cars, bombs exploding, warplanes patrolling or being blasted out of the sky, houses and people on fire."
Celmins says: "Basically I decided that I had to connect with myself ...I was trying lots of different things, different kinds of painting - I began to plumb myself. You know how you have to be behind what you're doing. I began to find things ... things that were really somehow a part of me ... there's a time when you are in your twenties and maybe in your early thirties when the whole idea of making something is so much of a fire in you."

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