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VMFA fellow Jane Winfield tries to understand the world through abstract painting

Lana Ferguson | July 10, 2017

Topics: abstract painting, art, The VMFA, VMFA Fellowship program

This is the first in a series of articles featuring the 2017-2018 VMFA fellowship recipients.   

Jane Winfield has always painted.

Some of her paintings takes years to make, some only days. All of them make you pause and think, though.

Winfield, a current VMFA Fellowship recipient, paints mostly large-scale abstract paintings. She said she uses her art to suss out spatial incongruencies.

“I think it’s when things confuse me, like if a shadow looks heavier than an object or a telephone pole is blocking somebody at the same pace that they’re walking towards you,” Winfield said. “I just like it when I don’t understand something because it means I can fill in the blanks. I can just make it all up, which is all I ever wanted to do.”

Photo by Jane Winfield

Winfield utilizes whatever materials she can, some traditional and others not so much, making for a wide range of surfaces.

Winfield’s husband Gabe has brought home things like concrete and tar to experiment with, she’s also used a baby bath sponge, and even improvised with flour and food dye when she’s run out of paint.

“I like that paint can go on anything, it’s so malleable and it’s so sexy but also forgiving,” Winfield said. “It can do anything you want it to do. The great thing is it’s just chaos and my job is to attempt to control it. I never really succeed but I love seeing what happens.”

She says her process is messy, but that makes it all the more fun.

“Sometimes I’ll paint on something for a while then forget about it and then go back years later and paint again,” Winfield said. “Sometimes I’ll leave it outside then I’ll paint over it, giving it a new texture. I feel like there should be no real limitations on what it is.”

After Winfield received her MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012, she taught painting and drawing classes at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. More recently, Winfield has been teaching drawing classes at her alma mater VCU since moving back home to Richmond.

Winfield’s had her first solo exhibition, “Signs of Life,”  in Savannah Georgia, showcased more than 10 of her original paintings, at the end of last year. Currently, she’s working on another exhibition that will be in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Pauley Center in August.

Winfield said she’s grateful to be an artist, getting to do what she enjoys day in and day out.

“I’m allowed to experiment where a lot of people don’t get that opportunity because they have to go to work and grind it out,” Winfield said. “I don’t know, maybe they find the same kind of love, but I feel like I’m learning all of the time and that’s what I love the most. I never feel like I’ve got it. I never feel like I’m winning so I’m always trying harder.”

And things have been a little harder, at least time wise. The Winfield family has doubled over the past year and a half with 18-month-old Rocko and one-month-old June.

  Photo by Jane Winfield

“Before the babies, it was just painting all the time and working,” she said. “Now I hustle around the house then paint whenever I can, which has been really interesting because you realize your limitations are just as much of an excitement.”

Winfield said she paints in bed every night. She even has a piece in progress over her bed right now.

“Sometimes the painting just hits you right and they’re done,” Winfield said. “The one I’m struggling with right now, I have over our bed because that way it’ll bug me every morning and antagonizes me until I get it right. It’s been driving me crazy for about a year now.”

For Winfield, art is about better understanding the world and receiving satisfaction through that.

“Above all else, art should not be cynical, especially when the impulse is so readily available to be that way,” she said. “I think things should be about hope because it’s hard. You have to do it because you want to do it and not to teach people a lesson. It’s about joy.”

Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘radically versatile’ work mixes fashion and art at the VMFA

Gabriella Lacombe | May 4, 2017

Topics: fashion, Florence Müller, The VMFA, Yves Saint Laurent

At age 21, he was made the head of the House of Dior. Five years later, he opened his own fashion house, and by the time of his death in 2008, he had become immortalized as one of the most brilliant fashion designers of the 20th century.

He was Yves Saint Laurent, and his innovative designs are on display now at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in the Yves Saint Laurent: The Perfection of Style exhibition.

Thanks to the combined efforts of the Paris-based Fondation Pierre Bergé — Yves Saint Laurent, Northern Trust, the Seattle Art Museum and countless others in the fashion and art world, the VMFA is the only East Coast venue where this comprehensive collection of Saint Laurent’s works will be shown.

Featuring the designer’s own sketches, fabric swatches, accessories and garments, the exhibit captures both the intense work ethic, use of color and range of inspirations that marked Saint Laurent’s career.

Chiefly curated by Florence Müller, the curator of fashion and design at the Denver Art Museum, the dozens of works in the exhibit follow the designer’s career from 1958 (the year after Saint Laurent was first pushed to the forefront of Dior) to 2002, and include pieces from YSL rive gauche, the brand that marked the designer’s revolutionary step into catering to a large-scale public as a couturier.

“What you will discover in this exhibition is a way through the creations of Yves Saint Laurent, but also the connections with his life,” said Müller. “You will see how he was intimately connected with his artwork… with his attitude, he was really the first couturier who was acting like a rock star.”

The designer’s willingness to be radically versatile shows in pieces like the Chicago short daytime ensemble (a look inspired by the “Beat” generation of Paris’s Left Bank) and his garments dedicated to Pop Art (doubtlessly inspired by the designer’s friendship with artist Andy Warhol). There was no avenue of interest that Saint Laurent did not explore, and so Yves Saint Laurent: The Perfection of Style provides a visual tasting menu of the designer’s presence in film costuming, gender-bending design, and the cultures of Africa, Greece, Morocco, and Russia.

The exhibition’s display of the designer’s process from pencil-on-paper to physical garment gives audience members a streamlined experience, bringing life to the art of fashion design through the lens of one of its most influential names.

“This remarkable exhibition presents Saint Laurent’s exquisite designs in an immersive environment that allows visitors to see firsthand the development of Saint Laurent’s style, as well as his impact on fashion, film, and popular culture,” said VMFA Director Alex Nyerges.

As a testament to Yves Saint Laurent’s influence on fashion today—besides the reorganizability of his initials— his longtime life and business partner Pierre Bergé said this about Saint Laurent’s body of work on France Info Radio:

“Gabrielle Chanel gave women freedom. Yves Saint Laurent gave them power.”

The exhibit is open to the public starting May 6 and will continue through August 27. For more information, you can click here.

VMFA’s ‘Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch’ highlights uncanny connections between important painters in challenging new exhibit

Brad Kutner | November 4, 2016

Topics: Evard Munch, Jasper Johns, John B. Ravenal, The VMFA

Born almost 70 years apart, you might not think painters Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch have much in common, but a massive new exhibit at the VMFA offers new insight into the two artists’s equally incredible works.
[Read more…] about VMFA’s ‘Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch’ highlights uncanny connections between important painters in challenging new exhibit

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