Alison Van Pelt
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Alison Van Pelt (born September 16, 1963) is an American painter. Trained in Los Angeles and Florence, Van Pelt is established as a contemporary artist whose work is informed by
expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
,
minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...
and pop art.


Biography

Van Pelt was born and raised in California and grew up in Los Angeles, where she attended the
University of California at Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the Ca ...
.Flight and the Figure: The Paintings of Alison Van Pelt, Rusconi Publishing, Los Angeles, 1999 She came of age in the 1970s and her distinctive
photorealist Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another Medium (arts), medium. Although ...
painting style is evocative of that era, when photography was assimilated into the art world. Painters—
Richard Estes Richard Estes (born May 14, 1932, in Kewanee, Illinois) is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of ...
, Denis Peterson,
Audrey Flack Audrey Lenora Flack (May 30, 1931 – June 28, 2024) was an American visual artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Flack had numerous academic degrees, includi ...
and
Chuck Close Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealism, photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits ...
among them—would create paintings that appeared to be photographs. Van Pelt begins by referencing a photograph or other existing image from which she draws and paints a realistic portrait entirely by hand. Next comes the work of obscuring the carefully rendered image. From a distance the image appears soft, as though photographed through a mist. But as the viewer approaches the work, vertical lines can be seen, and on closer inspection a sort of horizontal weave emerges. One writer described the effect this creates on Van Pelt’s ''The Expulsion of Adam and Eve'' as, "so thick with paint and lines that it actually appears to have been applied to wood, not canvas.Art International, Winter 1999, "The Universal Language" by Jeremy Rosenberg In response to the observation that her work is abstract, Van Pelt has said, "It’s my way of merging the tradition of portraiture with contemporary abstraction. I’m interested in ambiguity." A sublime tension is created in the contradiction between the crisp photorealism with which she first delineates her subject and the purposeful act of obscuring this subject, which ensues.World Art, No. 12, 1997, "Femme Noir" by George Melrod Viewed up close, a grid of ambiguous color meets the eye, but with distance the viewer gains the necessary objectivity to discern the subject. However, even with this revelation, a question remains as one writer so aptly noted: "Are the figures stepping forth into the tangible world or are they receding into the depths of the canvas?" The impetus for this creative tension has its origins in a visit to Paris in 1988. At the Beaubourg at
Centre Georges Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
, Van Pelt was captivated by the way
Francis Bacon Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon argued for the importance of nat ...
had smeared the paint on the face of one of his subjects, and that same evening found a postcard in which the nighttime streetlights appeared as blurry lines. After she returned home to California, the memory of these two images led Van Pelt to experiment with blurring the paint on a portrait of a woman’s face. Her style had coalesced. Her technique caught the attention of Los Angeles dealer Robert Berman, whose gallery exhibited several solo shows of Van Pelt’s work. In 1992, Van Pelt traveled to Florence, Italy to study painting at the
Florence Academy of Art The Florence Academy of Art is an American art school in Florence, in Tuscany in central Italy. It was started by Daniel Graves, an American painter, in 1991. Teaching is in the traditional style of the old masters. The school is a branch of ...
, where the ethereal style of her work prompted comparisons to the Shroud of Turin. During the two years she spent studying abroad, she showed her work in solo exhibitions overseas: the show New Work appeared at Galerie Paul Sties in Krönberg, Germany, New Paintings at Galerie Lauter in Mannheim, Germany, and Les Animaux Nouveaux at Galerie Vedovi in Brussels. Van Pelt’s portrait of
William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major Postmodern literature, postmodern author who influen ...
welcomed visitors to Ports of Entry, an exhibit of Burroughs’ work held at
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...
in 1996. The
Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members o ...
hero’s portrait, which appears on the cover for his book, has been described as a ghost-like image. One journalist described Van Pelt’s portrait of Burroughs as "peering out at us with his trademark craggy deadpan, looking characteristically haunted." A Parisian art collector, who also videotapes séances claimed that her paintings looked exactly like the ghosts he records.


Influences

Despite the interest that the visceral nature of Bacon’s paintings initially sparked, in comparison, Van Pelt’s work evokes a more languid approach to her subjects…
Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced Abstract art, abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, photographs and Glass art, glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important con ...
and
Mark Rothko Mark Rothko ( ; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903February 25, 1970) was an American abstract art, abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular reg ...
are among the artists who have exercised considerable influence on Van Pelt’s technique. More than one reviewer has noted that her portraits recall Richter’s blurred portraits of the infamous RAF members embroiled in the Baader-Meinhof scandal in the 1970s, but without the dark political associations. Nancy Burson’s composite portraits also come to mind.ArtScene, Vol. 12 No. 2, October 1992, Reviews The line and grid work of
Agnes Martin Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. Born in Canada, she moved to the United States in 1931, where she pursued higher education ...
sparked Van Pelt’s meticulous attention to detail in which Van Pelt places as much focus on each brush stroke as she does on a piece of work in its entirety. Van Pelt has said that Plato’s universal flow resonates for her.


References


External links


Alison Van Pelt Official WebsiteAlison in profile against an “If I Were Ed Ruscha” painting in NY Times “The Insider” articleProfile on L.A. Art HouseOCHI Gallery Press Release: Alison Van Pelt All AmericanThe Shroud of William Lee: Alison Van Pelt's Portraits of William BurroughsRoseart New Art Week: Alison Van PeltVC Art Gallery Exhibition -- Alison Van Pelt "If I Were Ed Ruscha..."Ventura College Art Gallery Review - "If I Were Ed Ruscha..." by Alison Van Pelt
* ttp://theartreserve.com/alison-van-pelt-a-painters-touch Alison Van Pelt: A Painter's Touchbr>Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Alison Van Pelt "Georgia"Chac Mool Press Release Alison Van PeltYogamatic 5-minute interview and yoga pose demo
{{DEFAULTSORT:Van Pelt, Alison Living people 1963 births Painters from Los Angeles American people of Dutch descent University of California, Los Angeles alumni 21st-century American women painters 21st-century American painters