Flesh and Stone

by Ingrid D. Rowland

Wendy Artin, Andrea, 7″ x 13″, watercolor, 2022

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Like Michelangelo’s Captive emerging from his block of marble, Wendy Artin’s figures emerge from an alchemical suspension of pigment in water that allows a blotch of paint to become the arm of a real man, Andrea; a marble drape; the feathered stone wing of the fallen and mythic Icarus; or a whole repertory of shadows: as ethereal as an enveloping mist, as solid as the tiny cast shadow on the upper edge of a carved block of Pentelic marble that propels her image of the Parthenon frieze into three dimensions.

Rivulets of water dissolve Federica’s body and hair into a granular spray of sanguine, but the shadow cast on the tip of her left thumb by its nail argues for that body’s solidity, especially when that thumb itself is projected forward into space by the decisive shadow it casts on a particularly luminous expanse of flesh. 

Whether Wendy is painting warm flesh or cool stone, her watercolors convey a powerful sense of their object’s presence, registered above all as light, light in perpetual contrast with uncannily varied gradations of darkness.

The quicksilver movement of water captures the compelling, incessant movement–the liveliness–of her models, and makes her paintings of sculpted bodies quiver with something akin to life in two dimensions.

Watercolor always imposes a certain spontaneity on painters, but in these new works Wendy lets the medium develop extreme degrees of abstraction, and the result–like those dabs of oil paint that Titian and Velazquez could turn into a Cupid’s wing or a lace collar–is a penetrating, infinitely suggestive glimpse into a world of sight, sense, and physicality.

Ingrid D. Rowland
November 2022

Wendy Artin, Winged Eros and Butterfly, 7″ x 9″, watercolor, 2022