THIS WEEK’S MUSE
AMBERA WELLMANN, ARTIST
“I hope people look at my paintings in a fragmented way, as things having their own timeline.”
Artist Ambera Wellmann was born in 1982 in Lunenburg, a port town on the south shore of Nova Scotia – and raised in a “dreary log cabin in the middle of the woods.”
Central to her creative position has been to challenge the tradition of the male gaze—ubiquitous throughout the history of art. This grounded her work with a female perspective. Consequently, her figures tend to reject obvious gender identity – blurring, blending and dissolving into one another and their surroundings.
“I am searching for ways to pictorially structure female desire, an endeavor that almost always coincides with an internalized male gaze—so there is rarely a singular sense of a body or self in the paintings.”
An early focus for Wellmann was how to satisfactorily render the body’s surface to create a “sensual sense of skin.” When painting an old porcelain sink at college, an acrylic underlayer accidentally bled through the painting, creating an unexpected sense of depth on the surface. She developed this “porcelain sheen” accident into a technique and a style that remains a characteristic feature of her work.
There is an essence of Francis Bacon in her work – her use of form and color, and an (understated) violence and terror suggest his presence. She is simultaneously inventive and disturbing, playful and serious – often within the same image. Her fluidity and technique end the similarly, enabling the viewer to use Bacon simply as a signpost into her world.
Wellmann approaches her paintings with “painterly catachresis” – a process of using an image in a deliberately incorrect way. Her figures are unending and connected, their setting disjointed and often only hinting at a reality we privately complete. This is manifest through indeterminate numbers of bodies, genders, limbs, and species without any predetermined visual hierarchy or clear setting. The resulting images require the viewer to bring their own understanding. “I want [my work],” said Wellmann, “To reach a state where they can be interpreted but not explained.”
As an artist, she doesn’t fit the disorganized, messy painter stereotype. Instead, she is careful and attentive to her tools and space and knows that to create her work, she needs to be wide awake and “know where the brushes are.”
Through her work, Wellmann interrogates an array of art-historical voices, including Medieval Art, Romanticism, Modernism, and Surrealism. The result is none of those things but a unique a body of work that is both unexpected and compelling.
“I like it when people get close to paintings, really close, and you have to with mine to see the layers.”
https://www.amberawellmann.com/
HAPPENING
Tuesday, July 11, 10–11am
COFFEE & MOTHER EARTH: HERBS
With Priscilla Husband
Easy and delicious – let’s plant more herbs!
Member: $14, Non-member: $16