Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan was born in 1922 and passed away in 2008. She was an abstract expressionist heavily influenced by Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Elaine de Kooning. Grace worked fervantly to establish her own style and break new grounds in her art, but she
never broke entirely with the figurative tradition. Determined to
stake out her own artistic ground, she turned outward from the
interior world sanctified by the Abstract Expressionists and embraced
the visual swirl of contemporary American life.
“Her
art was marked by a willingness to employ a variety of styles in a
modernist idiom, to go back and forth from art-historical references
to pop-culture references to autobiographical material,” said
Robert Saltonstall Mattison, the author of “Grace Hartigan: A
Painter’s World” (1990).
I thought this little tidbit from her obituary was an interesting insight to the late artist's character. "Grace
Hartigan grew up in rural New Jersey,
the oldest of four children. Unable to afford college, she married
early and, in a flight of romantic fancy, she and her husband, Bob
Jachens, struck out for Alaska to live as pioneers. They made it no
farther than California, where, with her husband’s encouragement,
she took up painting." This seems to be an accurate picture of our modern day artist, with her whims and fancies, and did I mention ADD?
“I
didn’t choose painting,” she later told an interviewer. “It
chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius.” .....OK Grace. A little bit egotistical, but we feel you girl.
Another quote I found interesting from Grace: “Pop
Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion,”
she said in the 1960’s. I am not so sure I agree with her on this quote, because I believe that art is (for the most part) in the eye of the beholder. But she was certainly a bold lady, opinionated and strong, important qualities for someone trying to put their own stamp of beauty on this world.
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