“Art, whatever it takes”
The RomeArtProgram has made a series of interviews with Artists living in Italy, the USA & the UK
to know their feelings and orientation during these times of emergency.
Wendy Gittler – New York painter & art historian.
New show opens September 8 at First Street Gallery, Chelsea NYC.
RomeArtProgram: Where do you live? and what is your background?
Wendy: I live in New York City. My father was a foreign correspondent and most of my childwood was spent moving every year to another place, particularly the capitals of Europe: Berlin, Paris and Rome. After returning to the United States, I had already been exposed to the ancient ruins of the Mediterranean and modern art including such artists as Beckmann and Matisse. These travels imbued in me a strong sense of the particular nature of place.
My interest in high school and my undergraduate college years were a combination of acting, literature, art history and painting. In those early years Paul Klee was a major influence. His transformation of the physical world into abbreviations and hieroglyphs evoked a poetic parallel universe beyond perceptual experience.
Later I received an MA and an MFA in art history and painting.
RAP: In your opinion is there a “creative method”?
Wendy: There are as many creative methods as there are artists and diverse historical canons. Different methods can be an armature for later visual explorations.
RAP: The “lockdown moment” can set you on the path of some important change(s) in your creativity and style… Has it happened to you?
Wendy: The lockdown is the natural world of the artist. It further enforces your own interior explorations by limiting the external motion of your life and arresting the daily concept of time.
RAP: What normally inspires you? Which is the most important inspirational source you have found in Rome?
Wendy: Actually what inspires me is the countinual visual kaleidoscope of life. The layers of civilization melting into one another in Rome, has influenced my pictorial concept of space and time.
The architecture and the arboreal forms of the Villa Borghese Park with its umbrella-like trees reveal the clarity between intervals of volume, line and space.
RAP: Is there a difference in working in Rome for an artist? What art medium do you prefer to work in?
Wendy: It is a city where the buildings with their vibrant earth tones and sculptural forms create an interplay making one more conscious of how the visual world can already manifest the components of painting. I work in collage, mixed media and oils.
RAP: Specific events and historical conditions have a significant role in the creative process; how does this pandemic emergency affect the Arts?
Wendy: It makes one more aware that the world is not only composed of levity but reveals the nature of gravity through change, chance and mortality.
RAP: How are you feeling as this difficult moment and what made you feel this way? …are you optimistic for the future?
Wendy: So much has happened in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but the pandemic is a reminder that disaster can enter, even invisibly, into your front door. Optimism depends on your philosophic disposition and comprehension of history and life in general. Optimism for me doesn’t encompass the complexity in which I perceive events.
RAP: What can Art contribute to history? Will “Art save us”?
Wendy: The primary role of Art is communication embedded in an informed and enlightened visual language. A world without art leaves a vacuum. Artists provide a palpable experience of the many diverse ways of knowing the physical and psychological world as filtered through their individual psyche.
RAP: What is your most ambitious dream?…and the greatest sacrifice that you have made for your Art?
Wnedy: The artist is almost born with a need to reconstruct in visual or verbal language their experience of the world. The practice of art could be seen as a form of religion that becomes an artistic impulse that motivates and directs the course of their life.
RAP: Recently the artistic and cultural message of Italy and Rome was reemerging as a great “work in progress”, …is this your point of view?
Wendy: Art historians are delving into both the finite details and the larger philosophic concepts. The historical aspects of the past that were not fully comprehended continue to be clarified and expanded; in particular, ideas of classicism are still being uncovered in their full complexity.
RAP: Which is your favorite Italian, or Roman, place(s) of art (Museum, Gallery, Monument…)?
Wendy: My favorite places in Rome are the park of Villa Borghese, the Pantheon and the ancient ruins of the Palatine hill as well as the street and cafè life.
RAP: Which period of Italian art do you prefer? What is your favorite Italian work of art?
Wendy: I am deeply influenced by Pompeian painting and in particular the Villa of Mysteries is still very much alive for me. I also feel that De Chirico has been able to merge the modern psyche with the ancient world and I am drawn to his multiple paintings of Ariadne abandoned in the piazzas of Italy.
RAP: How has Rome personally influenced you as an artist and a person?
Wendy: In the middle of the modern world, the mystery of the past lingers and it is this fusion of past and present that plays a major role for me. Rome further illuminates the creation and waning of civilizations with their patterns of growths entropy and resurgence.
RAP: What is your goal? What role does the artist have in society? Any final thoughts and advice?
Wendy: In my painting, my sense of form, space and time are deeply allied with poetry, choreography, theatre and cinema. My goal is to wed the interior and exterior worlds. My works are the result of a palimpsest of years that reflect the inherent tension between self, others and place; a place no longer fixed but open to a spatial arena of memory and time.
Wendy Gittler at the First Street Gallery NYC
www.firststreetgallery.org/artists/wendy-gittler/wendy-gittler-press-release
RomeArtProgram is ready to bounce back!
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