Rome is not a classics factory, but it is a gold mine. Its usefulness to painting is like its constant re-appearence in architecture--an appearance that is maligned by some, but recognized as full of possibility by others. Writing about the neo-classicists McKim Mead & White, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger once observed, ."These architects were fundamentally non-ideological--this is the most important lesson their work holds for us now. They did not design in terms of theories and dogmas; they believed in looking at the past to assist them in evolving forms that would respond to their needs of the present... They also believed, as did many of their peers, that there was no inherent conflict between historical form and modern technology."

The same can be said about Wendy Artin's painting. It is non-ideological, but infused with the shapes and forms that may have been originally classical but are now simply a means to an end. Having lived in Rome in recent years, and painted many pictures of contemporary subjects--a motorino, a bus, a graffiti-covered wall--Wendy Artin concentrates in this exhibition on the timeless: the human figure, the Roman ruin, the vegetables of the Campo de' Fiori. In so doing, she allows us to see again why the classical vocabulary is inexhaustible.

Being in Rome slows us all down, turns us all into painters, and reminds us all of what classicism contributes to the built world. Wendy takes the same views that attract us all--the umbrella pine, the solitary column, the river god--and turns them into images we recognize but feel we have never really seen before. They are familiar but alive, fresh, and inevitable.

Writing in In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting, the art critic John Russell remarked, "Everything in Rome has been built for the sake of painters." And Wendy Artin is made for Rome, with its agelessness, its heat, its complete passivity. She travels by bicycle with a slim folder of equipment slung over her shoulder and alights in one of the city's great piazze as though it had been built specifically for her eye to behold. Artin paints day in and day out, sometimes working on the same view, or the same statues, or the same dilapidated fountain over and over. You have the feeling that Artin has studied what she has chosen to paint and composed it in her mind, so that when she arrives at her destination, she can simply jump in. She has chosen her paper carefully--it is made of banana, jute, or some other textured, thick material that has the raggedy shape or found quality that makes it seem to belong to Rome's aeternitas. Her marks on that paper can be perfectly representational or completely abstract. They can seem three-dimensional or almost calligraphically spare. She does not sketch first or test the water in any way. She dives in.

She dives in, and she seems to burrow into her paper, disappear into it even. Then she comes back to our world with a catch: a fish, glimmering and wet; a cabbage, effusive, filling the page; or, at her absolute best, a human figure, or a ruin, or a moment of light still making its way to us, and by her act of catching it, rendered eternal.

Looking at Artin's paintings makes us understand why those who are loved have their portraits commissioned by those who love them, because once they are caught, they exist forever, or at least for as long as the picture lasts. It is an act of love. And Wendy Artin painting Rome, catching it this way, is an act of love. If the problem of art is to make something alive, in whatever language it takes to be understood, she has succeeded by inventing a language that has classical roots but a visceral immediacy. From these lovely watercolors, we understand more about painting and more about Rome; we understand more about its timeless pull on us, and more about what the Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen had in mind when she wrote, "...if my discoveries are other people's commonplaces, I cannot help it--for me they retain a momentous freshness... What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate."

Adele Chatfield-Taylor FAAR '84
President, American Academy in Rome