Wendy Artin
Peintre
Wendy Artin is an American artist who has turned the classical world, particularly the architecture and statuary of her adopted city, Rome, into the subject of a remarkable body of work. Particularly gifted at drawing the figure, Artin declares: “Ancient statues are my favorite models”.
Eric Fischl, who observed her drawing from live models, says: “I couldn’t take my eyes off her work. I had never seen anyone capture, with such fluid grace and comfort, the depth of observation of the human form as she was able to do so quickly and precisely in watercolor”. According to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, President of the American Academy in Rome, “she is a classically trained painter, but her work is absolutely contemporary”. Although her subject is Rome, a city thousands of years old, Wendy’s work is not a throwback. Born in Boston, Wendy Artin received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1990.
She also studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris from 1982 to 1985. During the 1980s, she traveled and drew in the streets and museums of Europe and Central America. Since 1993, she has held solo exhibitions in Paris, New York, Boston, Milan and Rome. She is currently artistic advisor at the American Academy in Rome, where she began the drawings for the Arion Press edition of Seamus Heaney’s poetry Stone From Delphi, the project that inspired the work for these exhibitions. She has just received the ICCA’s (Institute of Classical Architecture Art’s) 2023 Arthur Ross Award.