Wendy Artin
Painter
Wendy Artin studied for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris before returning to her native Boston, where she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. After traveling through many countries, she finally dropped anchor in Rome, captivated by the sunlight that transfigures stone.
On Khadi paper, a sheet of Indian cotton, Wendy Artin casts rapid strokes in the manner of a Japanese calligrapher, capturing the force of the Roman landscapes and marbled bodies that come into view.
In a plastic language rooted in models from the past, she revitalizes hieratic statues, echoing her studies of gnarled, animated nudes. Under her brush, columns and domes rise amid cypresses and umbrella pines.
“With light touches, infinitely light, transparency upon transparency, she succeeds in telling us about stone, marble, water, trees, leaves and water: the water that trickles under her watercolor brush seems as fluid on paper as it is in the air of Rome,” comments academician Pierre-Jean Rémy.
Wendy Artin reveals the “vestiges of a luxury without pomp, as unimperial as possible, of a wealthy amateur striving to unite the delights of art with the pleasures of the countryside”, as described by Marguerite Yourcenar in her notes for “Hadrian’s Memoirs”.
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.
“Living in Rome and admiring Rome is my way of admiring and painting it. I’ve been painting the eternal beauty of the remains of antiquity for years.”
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.
It has just received the 2023 Arthur Ross Award from the ICCA (Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s).
