Iconic Female Artists and their Stationery Tools

Art is an essential human activity, and as we are seeing in the social media world of today, the drive to create art is also very common. How does one stand out from that crowd? Artists throughout the ages have faced this challenge, and since Western art over past several centuries has been a male-dominated activity, women in art have faced the challenge of standing out and being recognized on a whole different level.

Step with us through the last century to the lives of five very distinct and iconic female artists who stood out, some in their lifetime, and some well after. They went against the trends or created their own schools of art. They rejected the status quo of their times and invented new ways of using their mediums and materials of choice.

They were iconic in who they were and in what they did and continue to be. They changed the way we look at the world, as all good artists do.

 1.Hilma af Klint

Little was known about Swedish artist Hilma af Klint until recently, but as the World learns more about her from her work and records, it is becoming likely that she was one of the first western abstract art painters. Her abstract paintings predate the works of Wassily Kandinsky (credited as the the pioneer of abstract art) although they were not seen publicly until 1986.

Hilma af Klint was born in 1862 into a distinguished Swedish family of naval officers, navigators and ocean map-makers who instilled in her a love for mathematics, botany and visual arts. She studied portraiture and landscape painting at Konstfack in Sweden and then honed her skills at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1882–1887.

Klint’s landscapes, botanical drawings, and portraits were well-know, but her ‘life’s work’ remained a quite separate practice and she chose not to display it until 20 years after her death. Hilma af Klint was influenced by Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky and Carl du Prel, and was interested in the Occult, Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Spiritualism. In the 1890’s, scientific discoveries such as X­-rays, radioactivity, and the electron had a profound impact on her work.

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After the loss of her younger sister, Klint created “The Five,” a group of like-minded female artists who attempted to bridge the gap between the physical and spiritual worlds through seances, automatic painting and writing. Symbols, signs, language, diagrams, biomorphic forms, color charts, and geometric shapes appeared in Klint’s radical, bold and colorful paintings. Klint used a palette of pink, yellow, blue, red, and green to paint her multitude of signs, symbols and words in these works, which was nearly unheard of at that time.

In the early stages of her artistic development she executed portraits, landscapes, and botanical works in watercolor, ink and graphite on paper, and oil paint. She preferred using egg tempera, which is formed by combining egg yolk and pure pigments. Klint worked on a wet-on-wet watercolor technique for the rest of her creative life, producing more than 200 watercolors from an anthroposophical approach. She left behind almost 1,200 works and 26,000 pages of writing in comprehensive diaristic notebooks, including an “index” she created to de-code the symbology in her paintings. The Hilma af Klint Foundation owns and manages most of Klint’s paintings and notebooks. Paintings for the Temple, Primordial Chaos, The Swan, Tree of Knowledge and Altarpieces are among her most popular artworks.

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2.Tamara de Lempicka

Tamara de Lempicka, often known as “The Baroness with a Brush,” was a Polish artist known for her portraits of nobles and Hollywood stars, as well as stylized nude paintings and self-portraits that emphasized female empowerment, sensuality and independence of the 1920s. Along with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide, Lempicka was part of the avant-garde art scene.

She was born in 1898 to an affluent family in Warsaw, Poland and was exposed to the arts from early childhood. Lempicka joined Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she studied art under influential artists including Maurice Denis and Andre Lhote (French Cubist painter and art critic) whose Art Deco style impacted her style and technique. “My goal is never to copy, but to create a new style, clear luminous colors and feel the elegance of the models” Lempicka remarked, rejecting the Impressionist style of painting which was popular during her time. She developed a distinct style that was distinguished by her clear, reprisentational paintings and radiant colors.

Lempicka was known for her fierce independence, display of wealth, and her insatiable sexual appetite. She was enamored by the hedonistic lifestyle of 1920s Paris, admitting that she chose to live in the margins, beyond the “normal rules of society.”

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Tamara de Lempicka was a Renaissance art admirer and a classicist. Her paintings were characterized by superb draughtsmanship, photographic lighting and sensual modeling, all of which she skillfully combined with neo-cubism, futurism, and art deco techniques. Lempicka’s striking female portraits have come to personify the timeless glamour of Art Deco. Lempicka dabbled in abstract art and developed a new style using a palette knife when the Art Deco style began to fade in favor of Abstract Expressionism. Some of Lempicka’s most enthusiastic collectors are Jack Nicholson, Barbara Streisand, and Madonna.

3.Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin became known for her square canvasses and characteristic hand-painted grids and stripes on muted backgrounds throughout the course of a five decade career. Her art has been described as an “essay in discretion on inwardness and silence.” Martin was born in rural Canada in 1912 and migrated to USA in 1932, where she aspired to become a teacher. She relocated to Taos, New Mexico, after receiving her degree in arts and began her career creating landscapes and biomorphic paintings featuring floating organic-like structures. She was influenced by Zen Buddhism and Taoism, as were most of her peers, and her paintings exhibited meditative attention and an interest in nature.

Martin returned to New York in the late 1950s and joined the roster of famed New York gallerist Betty Parsons. During this time, she perfected her grid-based compositions and established herself as a successful artist. Martin, a deeply private person, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her 40s and, at the height of her career, returned to New Mexico, where she lived alone for majority of her working life.

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Martin used mathematical equations to methodically design each grid and and line in her paintings, then transferred the composition on a canvas by brushing it with oil or acrylic paint. She would then draw graphite lines using a short T-square and a string to guide her hand. Martin updated the grid’s general format with wider horizontal and vertical bands of color towards the later portion of her career. Martin experimented with a number of mediums and materials in her painting, including oil, acrylic, wood, and gold leaf, but for her canvas paintings, she settled on acrylic gesso with graphite pencil lines after 1974.

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4.Helen Frankenthaler

“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.” These are the words of Helen Frankenthaler, one of the greatest American abstract expressionist artists, who made significant contributions to the history of postwar American painting and was a driving force behind the Color Field painting movement.

Frankenthaler was born in 1928 in New York City and received her earliest art instruction from Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School, and later from Paul Feeley at Bennington College, Vermont. Clement Greenberg (art and literary critic) and Hans Hofmann (catalyst of the Abstract Expressionist movement) were two of her major influences.

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Helen pioneered the “soak-stain” technique by refining Jackson Pollock’s approach to abstract art. She would stand over an un-stretched canvas place on the floor and pour turpentine-thinned paint from coffee cans directly onto the canvas, allowing it to spill forth, drip, and splatter. The resulting painting had an airy and luminous color wash effect that appeared to merge with the fabric of the canvas. The Color Field Painting movement arose from this approach of giving an entirely new look and feel to the canvas.

In addition to her paintings, Frankenthaler is known for her imaginative lithographs, etchings and screen prints. She created woodcuts that mimicked her watercolor-like paintings using the soak-stain technique in printmaking.

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5.Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins is a New York-based modern photorealist and visual artist. Celmins was born in the Latvian capital, Riga in 1938 and immigrated to USA to study at the John Herron School of Art, Yale University and UCLA. Vija Celmins has long been admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints represent settings that are too ephemeral to be fixed in one’s imagination. Giorgio Morandi, an Italian monotone still life painter, is a huge influence on her art practice.

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After graduating from UCLA in the 1960s, Celmins specialized in photorealistic paintings and pop-inspired sculptures of everyday objects such as a pencil, eraser, hot plate, desk lamp, fan, and a heater – which she painted in tonal gradations of grey. She became well-known in the 1960s for her photorealistic paintings of war scenes, as well as Surrealist sculptures based on everyday functional objects.

By the 1970s she abandoned painting and her focus shifted to natural imagery such as the ocean, the night sky, spider webs, and desert landscapes which she rendered in different grades of graphite pencil and charcoal. Celmins utilized a light layer of acrylic ground on the paper and used a different black pencil for each drawing, ranging from very hard to very soft, to get a wide and subtle range of grays.

Celmins explained her work as “re-describing” the picture ― starting with a photograph and re-inventing it mark by mark in another medium. The fact that Celmin’s work is devoid of any trace of human sketching is noteworthy. Celmins has returned to painting and printmaking since the 1980’s, and she is currently working on a series of three-dimensional slate writing tablets.

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The materials matter, the tools matter, your choice of expression matters. But these artists prove that what you do with those building blocks is what can really set you apart. So choose your stationery or art weapon of choice and fly with it.

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