Put a crayon in the chubby fist of a 5-year-old and the resulting drawings might only loosely resemble reality. Purple trees and blue dogs with what may or may not be wings. Everything out of proportion. Scribble marks the youngster insists show an airplane in the clouds yet, to you, just look like scribbles.
This is abstraction — a shift away from representing the physical world — which for children might equate to undeveloped cognitive and fine motor skills. Abstract art can look simple, especially to an audience conditioned to realism. Yet for many artists, abstraction isn't a lack of anything, but rather an abundance, a release of sorts for both the viewer and the artist.
"I see painting as a poetic response to your emotional observations in nature rather than trying to re-create it like a photo, [which] doesn't really tell me anything about how I was feeling beyond the image," says Ellen Vieth, one of seven regional artists whose abstract paintings are included in The Art Spirit Gallery's April exhibition, "Abstract Expressionism."
"Given the opportunity, I think a lot of people want to experience that freedom you had when you were a kid and [things are] not so defined by realism," Vieth adds.
As an art history term, abstract expressionism is sometimes confusing, but is essentially the dynamic style and artmaking approach a group of New York-based artists developed in the 1940s and '50s.
The impact of abstract expressionism cannot be understated, doing for American art what impressionism did for France 120 years earlier. Yet whereas impressionists were still tethered to real-life observation, many abstract expressionists were not. More concerned with thoughts, feelings and concepts, they drove development of a bold new visual language centered on color, shape, line, form, etc.
In a way, Vieth and the other artists in the Art Spirit exhibition are all direct descendants of the abstract expressionist movement, even though only two artists, Amy Stone and Melanie Biehle, specifically describe their work as such. Thinking about abstraction on a continuum from somewhat abstract to very abstract helps illustrate the point.
Vieth's Big Pink Flower, for example, has enough recognizable shapes to jibe with the painting's title. Robins Return is less straightforward and more abstract, but still conveys a spring landscape through its pastel color palette, horizontal composition and plant-like shapes along the bottom. Vieth's Clouds and Flowers, however, is so abstract, the composition is a puzzle of shapes, colors, lines and gestures, nudging the viewer to dig deeper for understanding.
Other artists in the exhibit, including Gail Siegel, Iskra Johnson and Stella Nall (Apsáalooke/Crow Tribe) work so abstractly that the subject matter is unrecognizable. That offers a newer art history term, non-referential or nonobjective, and embodies the freedom to simply engage with the artwork visually, something many original abstract expressionists would have applauded.
It's no accident the seven participants in Art Spirit's "Abstract Expressionism" exhibition are female. The exhibition was inspired by Mary Gabriel's 2019 book, Ninth Street Women, which reframes the narrative of how abstract expressionism was birthed not just by art stars like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, but also by its starlets like Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler.
Gabriel sets the scene in lower Manhattan during the late '40s and early '50s, where groups of mostly male and a handful of female artists lived, worked and socialized. Although New York had become an incubator of early modernist art, fed in part by artists fleeing Europe during and after World War II, the downtown collective struggled for recognition, a dilemma female artists knew well.
Noticing an abandoned storefront in their neighborhood — it was on Ninth Street — the group of mostly painters and a few sculptors organized themselves and an exhibition with epic repercussions.
The "9th St. Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture" triggered a seismic shift in the art world, placing the so-called New York School at the epicenter of all things modern and cool. Not only was the artwork bold and unique, the exhibition also elevated artwork by women to equal status as that produced by men.
But while many male abstract expressionists become household names in art history — Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg — the women, including the five upon which Gabriel focuses on in her book, have not.
That resonated with Vieth, who remembers learning about female impressionists like painter Mary Cassatt and a little about modernists like Helen Frankenthaler, but with very little historical notation, she says.
"They were still pretty invisible," Vieth says.
And when female artists were discussed, she continues, "they were always overshadowed."
Like Vieth, Virginia Shawver feels a kinship with the female artists in Gabriel's book, including their struggles and having to make choices in pursuit of their art that men typically don't have to.
"I have worked my whole life in the arts but in the shadows, on the back burner for those exact reasons that those women talk about in that book," Shawver says.
Although she is appreciative of all the ways she was still able to be involved with art while raising a family, Shawver is rededicating herself to her own work now that her children are grown.
She takes inspiration from artists like Georgia O'Keefe, who, like many women in Gabriel's book, was also married to an artist whose career eclipsed her own until she moved to New Mexico, where she immortalized its desert landscape in paint.
Shawver admires O'Keefe's landscapes, but also her lifelong commitment to her artwork, which still resonates with modern viewers more than 80 years later.
"I hope that I can provoke the same emotion when viewing art that Georgia did for me," Shawver says. "You just want people to look at the art and just feel passionate." ♦
Abstract Expressionism • Through April 30; open Wed-Sun from 11 am-6 pm • Free • The Art Spirit Gallery • 415 Sherman Ave., Coeur d'Alene • theartspiritgallery.com • 208-765-6006