I began my Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo in the midst of a prolific period of my artistic career. During the COVID-19 lockdown I created over a hundred round landscape paintings in which I used stripes as a vehicle to study color relationships. I began to solidify my identity as an abstract painter interested in color theory, art history, and self-portraiture. The result was the painting below, replete with art historical references and an uncanny tenor derived from looking at far too many surrealist paintings.
Emma Whitaker, Shades of Gray (Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo), 2020-23, acrylic on wood panel, 16 x 20 x 3/4.”
In the quiet of her studio, the artist is about to embark on a new painting project wearing a white robe symbolic of a fresh start. She steps forward trepidatiously onto the teal “grass,” representing the fertility of her imagination. I borrowed the pose from Remedios Varo’s 1961 painting La Llamada (The Call), in which the artist, wearing flowing robes and carrying alchemical tools, depicts herself being called to a mysterious adventure.
Remedios Varo (b.1908) was a Spanish painter who experienced political persecution in Europe and fled to Mexico, where she created evocative surrealist paintings until her death in 1963. She was influenced by a host of intellectual currents and ideas, including mysticism, psychoanalysis, animism, biology, physics, and alchemy. Remedio Varo’s paintings are non-narrative, meaning that they invite the viewer to rely on their own imagination to complete the story. Situated in architecture reminiscent of the Giotto’s late Medieval frescoes, there is a historical grounding to her work. I like to imagine that her artwork reveals a secretive group of women sorcerers that have been at work for centuries. Remedio Varo’s work gives me permission to create dreamscapes for the mind to wander and get a little lost.
Remedios Varo, La Llamada (The Call), 1961, Oil on Masonite, 42 x 31 x 1 1/2,” National Museum of Women in the Arts.
The premise behind my artwork is that all matter is made up of particles in perpetual motion. I learned about this in science class, of course, but also in Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 book The Swerve. The book hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovers Lucretius’ ancient poem On the Nature of Things, which had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years. The De Rerum Natura was a didactic poem that asserted that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. The poem was controversial because it meant that there was no need for focus on the afterlife, for gods, or for religious fear, because the body is just matter that is reconstituted after death as part of the cycle of life.
In drawing classes, artists learn that matter is shaped into geometric forms, like spheres, cylinders, cubes, cones, and pyramids, and into more free-flowing, organic forms. Forms are drawn using line and rendered three dimensional using shading. My work relies mostly on line - I essentially create a coloring page for myself. Everything is made up of the same stuff, and there is a feeling that the objects in the room could be shifted and rearranged. The marble slab leans precariously to the right as if it could melt and transform into something else. The threshold at the door of my studio is painted bright blue like water, underlining the fact that the division between indoor and outdoor is porous.
The gray slab is loosely based on the Severan marble plan, also known as the Forma Urbis Romae, a massive marble plan of Rome created under the emperor Septimius Severus between 203 and 211 CE. I liked the idea of a massive plan so detailed that it recorded even the staircases of private residences. I ended up using Piranesi’s study of the plan because of the organic forms and the negative space created in between the fragments. They forms reminded me of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting called Above the Clouds, and so I decided to remove any allusion to the original plan, and just keep the forms.
G.B. Piranesi, The Roman Antiquities T.1, plate IV – Map of Ancient Rome and Forma Urbis, 1756.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Above the Clouds, 1962-63, 36 1/8 x 48 1/4 inches, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.
My Self-Portrait contains numerous tools of the art teacher, which has become an essential part of my identity as an artist. I painted the slab with different shades of gray as allusion to the grayscale, also known as the value scale. The idea behind the value scale is that if you desaturate a color, it will still have a lightness or darkness. For example, if you removed the “yellow” from a swatch of yellow paint by turning off the lights, you will have a very light square of color. Conversely, green and red are very dark colors. If you desaturate them, you will have two very dark squares of color.
The value scale.
Open your iphone camera, find the filters feature, and press “Mono.” This value scale should look the same as the one to the left.
In the Self-Portrait, the artist will paint the slab in front of her with colors that correspond to their values on the grayscale. Her paints and her paint chips, useful for studying color relationships, are accessible to her. She wears color wheel glasses, another tool that artists use for developing color environments. She has other tools of the trade as well: a laptop, notebook, and espresso for her afternoon pick me up.
In art school, I felt as though I could see more colors than ever before. As a result of constantly mixing colors I was able to discern more subtleties in temperature and hue. The irony is that I cannot see any of these beautiful colors I’ve mentioned without my glasses. So, it was important to include glasses in my self-portrait!
Detail of my afternoon snack. I still have that little yellow book. It is filled with notes about Sventura, a children’s book concept I have been working on since 2017.
Next to the slab is a triangular shape that appears to have been sliced out of the ground. The missing piece has reappeared as a piece of cake on the table next to the gray artwork. This refers to a childhood memory I had when flying over the hills in Italy; I envisioned cutting the hills with a giant knife to reveal rainbow cake inside. The act of painting connects me to pleasure, adventure, and childlike imagination.
The four clocks, set to different time periods, place the artwork in the surrealist tradition. Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory is about how memories persist, but the passage of time is inevitable. Having clocks set to different times is my defiance of the ineluctability of time. Time is something I struggle to accept.
Out the door, we see an unpeopled city street inspired by the somber cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. Profoundly metaphysical in character, De Chirico’s paintings reflected the alienation and estrangement of post-war Italy. It seemed an appropriate choice for the COVID-19 pandemic, where on my long walks I would pass people who would step to the side and avert my gaze. A single smokestack indicates the presence of human life, but I don’t think the residents will come visit me in my studio.
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), Piazza d'Italia, 1950-55, oil on canvas, 16 x 19 7/8 in. (40.5 x 50.5 cm.).
My Self-Portrait after Remedios Varo exemplifies who I am as a painter. I treat the canvas as a place to create my own little world that makes sense to me. Just like I would want a viewer hundreds of years from now to have a direct and immediate experience of my paintings, I treat paintings from hundreds of years ago with the freshness as though they were created today. I invite ancient art to become part of my work, and in doing so I not only pay homage to the artist but I also imbue my work with a multiplicity of meanings. I continuously explore how colors interact, and I love to use rich, vibrant colors that are a feast for the eyes.
My hope is that you as the viewer can create your own meaning from my work according to your own life experience and visual history. I am curious to know what you see.