Welcome to the latest installment of 'Design Like...'
This month we are looking at three very different women who all made their mark as abstract painters: Agnes Pelton, Hilna af Klint, and Helen Frankenthaler. In this class we'll look at their wild and eclectic lives, their work, and the tricks and tropes they used in their work that gave it a distinct and unique flair. We want to pick the tricks, the language of colors, and the meanings out in class so that we can design like them for our rug making projects!
The Artists:
Helen Frankenthaler will take us to stylish Manhattan in the 1950s where she elbowed her way into a men-only world of postwar art. Daughter of a Supreme Court judge, Helen pioneered the modernist movement in New York City and exhibited her work for six decades. Decades! Her work has appeared in endless (I hope) exhibits playing off the angle of her being not just a trailblazing female artist, but a Jewish artist. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation she created in her lifetime recently donated 5million dollars to Covid relief. A truly unbelievable legacy.
German-born artist Agnes Pelton moved to the American Southwest as a child and began making portraits of Pueblo Native Americans and desert landscapes. Her work was exhibited successfully in Ogunquit, Maine in 1912 and set the stage for her to shapeshift many times as an artist, cementing her reputation as a transcendentalist desert painter.
If you're thinking of a hundred 1970s album covers, you're not wrong!
Hildna af Klint, Swedish artist and modernist trailblazer was both a mystic and a painter, in equal parts. Her works are considered the first abstract paintings in the History of Western Art. Yes, a woman. Beginning in 1906 Hilna began translating her visions as a medium onto enormous canvases that reflect her spiritualist backbone. After her death in 1944 her WAY-ahead-of-its-time work went unknown until recently when the Guggenheim staged a groundbreaking exhibit of her paintings.
When you sign up for the 'Design Like....' series you will receive an email a few days before class with any information you need (including log in). All you need to have for class is drawing paper and a pencil. You are never put on the spot; you can leave your camera on or off. The class is recorded and participants can watch the private link as often as you like, after class.
As you may know, I'm working on the first 'Design Like...' book for Rug Hooking Magazine. All three of these women are a part of that book project so if you end up designing and/or completing any rug project you create as a result of this class--- needless to say I would LOVE to use it in the book!