90265 Magazine, BODY OF WORK, Alison Van Pelt, Artist

http://issuu.com/90265magazine/docs/issue8mayweb

Jim Dicke II and Alex Nyerges, THE WOMEN, paintings by Alison Van Pelt, The Dayton Art Institute

THE WOMEN: Introduction
by Jim Dicke II and Alex Nyerges
Published in Alison Van Pelt: The Women. Ed. Michael K. Komanecky. Dayton, OH: The Dayton Art Institute
2004
An image of Frida Kahlo stares back at the viewer through a murky haze of time. The extraordinarily large canvas, measuring nine by seven feet, captures the late painter in a moment of pause, a hesitant moment of thought and introspection. This canvas and those of the other women artists in this exhibition ALISON VAN PELT: THE WOMEN illustrate the grace, power and beauty of these exceptional women and reflect the powerful imagination and talent of their creator, Alison Van Pelt.
The series is comprised of a veritable “who’s who” among women painters and sculptors of the twentieth century. Not meant to be comprehensive in any sense since they reflect the emotional and personal responses of Alison Van Pelt, they are quite impressive both individually and in the collective form. Van Pelt means to impress us. She painted these works on a grand scale “somewhat as a form of idolatry.” And it works. Her large canvases were limited only by the size of her studio doorway through which they entered and departed. The finished works are much larger in the psychological sense than a mere illustration in a catalogue can portray. These are works that need to be experienced – the value of the viewer’s personal interaction is as important as the interaction between the painter and the canvas at the point of creation. They are a wonderful homage to a group of women who, in Van Pelt’s own words, were “mavericks at a time when women were marginalized from the mainstream art world.”
Life is made of moments that pass as quickly as they arrive. Van Pelt’s images are based in photography but then are translated into a thin surface of paint. They capture those fractions of time for the viewer to ponder and contemplate.
We quickly recognized that it was important to exhibit and document this series before the inevitable occurred – these women would be separated and find homes in disparate points across the country and possibly the globe. This exhibition allows us to view the series of portraits in their entirety at the point in time closest to their creation. This is a rare and precious moment. And like that frozen slice of time in which we see Frida Kahlo’s inquisitive gaze, this exhibit and publication will stand as silent sentinels upon which we can reflect and contemplate.

Kelly Wearstler's showroom, the vault, Pete Doherty and Rupert Murdoch paintings by Alison Van Pelt

Kelly Wearstler's showroom is the vault in an old bank downtown. Pete Doherty and Rupert Murdoch paintings, I'd Be Loaded, from the series If I Were Ed Ruscha by Alison Van Pelt hang outside the vault

Victoria Beckham's new showroom, Jesus and David Beckham paintings by Alison Van Pelt, oil, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas

Ochi Gallery studio visit

Ochi Gallery studio visit

Ochi Gallery studio visit

Ochi Gallery studio visit

Ochi Gallery studio visit

GLAMOUR SQUAW, Alison Van Pelt Paintings

GLAMOUR SQUAW 

http://www.glamoursquaw.com/post/36579421278/fabulous-paintings-by-alison-van-pelt

FABULOUS: Paintings by Alison Van Pelt

Confession: All I want for Christmas is this painting by Alison Van Pelt.  It haunts me.
But who am I kidding? Every one of her paintings is seriously divine.  I’d take any of them!

From her famously haunting nudes to her Native Americans, animals, and more recent work from the “If I Were Ed Ruscha” series (like the one of Frida Kahlo above), Van Pelt has a way with the brush that strikes a delicate balance between ethereal and boldly powerful.
A true 1970’s California girl, Van Pelt’s painstaking photorealist style is tied to the influx of photography into the art world and is inspired by disparate influences such as Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Helmut Newton, Paramahansa Yogananda, Dan Millman, and Hunter S. Thompson.  It’s a powerful mix and something that is oddly tangible in her work. The canvases range in size from less than 8x10 inches to over 8x10 feet and are currently held by some of the most important art collectors and institutions in the world.

Here’s a little peek into her world……….
What is your creative process?
It’s a recurring marathon. I draw an image on canvas (or board, glass,
paper…) Then I paint, depending on the size of the piece, for a few
hours or a few days. I paint an image and once the image is complete, I blur the paint while the paint is wet. With a big piece this can take between 24 and 48 hours,
non-stop, non-sleep, until the paint is too dry to blend anymore. Then
I take a hot bath and in a perfect world, get a massage, a good meal
and a long sleep. That last bit is a vital component of the process.


Who has been the most influential person in your life?
My mom, Susan. She said I was a great artist and could do anything I
put my mind to. That’s a powerful message I heard when I was very
young and even when it’s not all green lights, I never questioned it.

What’s the most important education in your life (traditional or
self-education) and why?
I went to great schools - UCLA, Otis, Art Center and Florence Academy
of Art. But I did best alone, experimenting, making mistakes; that’s
when I’ve had my biggest leaps.

What serendipitous events brought you to your current career?
A great collector bought my first painting when I was 21. It seemed so easy.

What is your best attribute?
Patience and concentration.

What is your biggest flaw?
Procrastination.

Who do you admire most?
Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, Ethel Kennedy,
RFK, JFK, Martin Luther King Jr, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama!

Who would you would most like to meet?
Paramahansa Yogananda, Babaji, and my next husband.

Who is your favorite artist and why?
Frida Kahlo. Aside from her determination and strength, she could directly paint her dreams and raw emotion and make it beautiful, powerful and enchanting. In
contrast, Gerhard Richter, for his irony, intellect, and rigorous,
methodical, devoted practice and mastery of the paint.

Who is your favorite musician and why?
I have to pick three:  Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zepplin. Always
and forever - the soundtrack from my wild, magical, innocent youth.

What are you reading right now?
Upper Cut by Carrie White and Rebels in Paradise, The Los Angeles Art
Scene and the 60’s, by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. Both great!

What element of nature is most enchanting to you and why?
I love the woods by the sea - that’s the fantasy. I know, greedy; I
want two. I live at the beach and there’s a sense that the intensity
of the city is balanced by all that vast space.

What is your most defining life philosophy?
Peace and love. I was raised by hippies. It was always live and let
live, but I’m becoming
more outspoken and a little more courageous about standing up for
things; less need to make nice, not so scared to make waves.

Well, Ms. Van Pelt, you’re definitely making waves for all of us who love your work!
An excellent variety of work by Alison Van Pelt can be found through Roseark in West Hollywood and Santa Monica.
xoxo GS

The Queen, oil and acrylic on canvas, 5ft x 4ft, Alison Van Pelt

Fight: Alison Van Pelt by Robert A. Sobieszek, senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Fight: Alison Van Pelt
by Robert A. Sobieszek, senior curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art


To plunge beneath in order to arrive at a surface, to ground one’s vision on the palpable where there is none, and to assault the apparent because too much is still hidden – these thoughts may be useful in approaching the paintings of Alison Van Pelt. She was trained in modern painting at Art Center in Pasadena and Otis Parsons in Los Angeles, and then was classically retrained at the Florence Academy of Art. Much of the art taught at both Southern California schools centered around conceptualism, appropriation, word/text synergy, and postmodern theory. Florence presented her with something more ancient: beautiful form, the love of looking, and techniques of painting, of laying succulent colors in oil onto a canvas, of forming images that have still to be plumbed for some fugitive essence.
Contemporary painting, especially representational and figural painting, is fraught with a love/hate relationship with the photographic image. When patently obvious the symbiosis is taken for granted, when visually redacted as a critique of our culture of images the praxis is applauded, and even when the source is obscured its presence can be felt. The photos behind Gerhard Richter’s figures and still lives are exquisitely and magically transformed into paint. The photos that act as models for Chuck Close’s portraits are critical to the scaffolding of his painted enlargements. Richard Phillips takes the faces of young modes in advertisements and monumentalizes them. The photographic covers of popular magazines of the 60s and 70s are rather melancholically vested in the teenage reminiscences of Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings.
Alison Van Pelt’s relationship to photographic images is quite direct and unapologetic, as well. Carefully choosing images that interest her, she manually copies them, simply painting what she sees, and often manipulating and enlarging their scale. So far, there is little by way of innovation; earlier painters did this as a matter of procedure. In traditional representational painting, the image on the surface of the canvas was a mere analog to the image on the surface of the photographic emulsion, only the painting was done by hand, as if that gave it an edge of superiority. Modern artists had a choice; accept the surface of the image as it had been since Alberti – as a window onto the world – or challenge that surface for what it was: a fraud, a simulacrum, a fiction. Neither realist paintings nor photographs are “windows to the world” or “portals of perception.” They are simply surfaces which someone has played with, regardless of their chemicals or techniques.
Interrupt that surface, alter it, transform it, however, and something deeper may be gotten to Man Ray knew that in the 20s when he solarized his photographs, making us look more deeply upon their surfaces. Lucas Samaras knew it in the 70s when he physically disturbed his Polaroids’ emulsions before they dried. Van Pelt also knows this, and here, she breaks from slavish appropriation of the photographic image. While her faithful rendition of her source is still wet, its oils not yet set in their ways, she takes a dry brush to subtly blend, striate, blur, and dematerialize her forms until, as it were, they become mere Platonic shadows or suggestions or hints of themselves. Hidden within the surface of the paint and not atop the canvas, her subjects take on an essential quality of becoming, of yet to be finished, of possibilities rather than definitions, Caught in some viscous primal ooze, embryonic, dreamlike as in a dense fog, her images appear more within our vision than without, or as if they were projected from us outwardly upon the external retinal field from some deep recess of memory.
Van Pelt’s latest series, Fight, grows out of her last two series which also began with the same letter: Flight and Figures. Not the dynamics of startled birds imaged in mid-flight, nor the elegiac voluptuousness of barely emergent female torsos, Fight goes right to the matter of male aggression at one of its extremes, the heavyweight boxing match. Selected stills from videotaped classic fights are the primary source for the images: Sugar Ray Robinson vs. Randy Turpin, 1951; Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Lisson, 1964; Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, 1975; etc. The artist has discovered an extreme range of emotions in these stills, from animal violence to physical grace, from the exuberance of the victor to the despondency of the vanquished, from violence to tenderness. She also finds the beautifully dramatic and harsh overhead lighting of these old fights utterly irresistible.
Aside from portraits of celebrities or friends, this series is Van Pelt’s first foray into representing the male body, its masculine forms, its muscular physique, its martial singularity. In her series on the female form, her Venus-like Figures were pictured as strictly iconic, reverential, totemic, and purely in offering; here, in Fight, the male figures are in diametric opposition to both the earlier series and to themselves: they are portrayed as narrative, transactional, removed, and ultimately in action. Yet, while her female figures rose to the surface towards us in remote suspension, her male boxers remain just as remote, out there in some other depth, some other conflict. Van Pelt’s subjects are basic: primal mothers in iconic verticality and feral warriors in narrative horizontality.
Across this horizon, the fighters feign, jab, block, slug, recoil, clinch, and fall – fundamental steps in a complex metaphor of life, perhaps. Joyce Carol Oates may have called boxing the “drama of life in the flesh” and “America’s tragic theater,” yet many of the boxing images Van Pelt chooses to render anew show us the visual poetry of this sport, its masculine choreography, its athletic balance, its atavistic prowess. It really does matter which of the heavyweight champions or contenders was captured on film or videotape; the simple primitive nature of this complicitous and immemorial dance performed by males is sufficient for Van Pelt. The poetic essence of this dance, however, is not to be found in any specificity or particular details, but beyond them; not in the factualness of historical films, but in the thickness of the image’s transparency; not on the surface of the painting, but beneath it; not in pigments but in dreams. And dreams are never the surface of things.

ALISON VAN PELT, "If I Were Ed Ruscha...", lecture at Ventura College

 

Ventura College art exhibit opens

Santa Paula News
Published:  January 21, 2011

Ventura College Art Gallery exhibition featuring AlisonVanPelt - “If I Were Ed Ruscha” January 20-February 10, 2011
In this exhibition - using the artist Ed Ruscha as a theme and object of fantasy - Alison Van Pelt explores identity, envy, power, self-importance, self-acceptance, humor, and dreams. First sketched on canvas, a detailed portrait is painted by hand in oils, then deconstructed using brushes to achieve a soft, blurred effect. The letters and backgrounds, painted in acrylic and gold and silver leaf, interrupt the fluid, blurry portrait in the foreground and set the picture planes apart.

Alison Van Pelt is a Los Angeles based painter who uses a blurring technique to combine motion painting and photo-realism. She begins with a drawing on the canvas, based primarily on found images, such as historical figures, artists, writers, political and spiritual leaders, pop-culture icons, Native Americans, animals, athletes, and obscure faces and torsos. She builds on her drawing with layers of oil paint, blending to create a textured blurring effect that moves horizontally and/or vertically on the canvas. Viewed closely, the details are deconstructed, breaking down a hyper-realistic painting to a distorted and sometimes abstract image. This technique produces either the streaking effect of motion across the canvas or, like a hologram, the image seems trapped under the paint. Her portraits generate an idolized feeling; they create a sense of longing for a vanishing illusion.

Alison Van Pelt studied art at UCLA, Art Center, Otis Parsons and the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. Van Pelt has exhibited at galleries throughout Europe and America, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Dayton Art Institute, Fresno Art Museum, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum, and is represented in significant permanent collections including LACMA, The Armand Hammer Museum, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City, Nasa, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, The Long Beach Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, NY, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Currently, she has a solo-exhibition at Ochi Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho, through January 17 and is also on view at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, CA 90263.

Art Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday Noon-4 P.M. Free Admission.

American Horse, oil on canvas, 2010, Alison Van Pelt