#Edwina Leapman

[wherethespiritmeetstheboneposts]

Edwina Leapman, Untitled, ca. 1975

[abwwia]

11 Female Artists Who Were Pioneering Minimalists, by Meredith Mendelsohn

Mary Corse (born 1945) is an American artist who lives and works in Topanga, California.

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937—1990) was an Indian artist best known for her line-based drawings, and is today considered one of the most essential modern artists from India.

Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921 – Dec 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century.

Noemí Escandell (1942–2019) was an Argentine postwar contemporary artist. 

Carmen Herrera (May 31, 1915 – Feb 12, 2022) was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter.

Agnes Bernice Martin RCA (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism.

Jo Baer | Josephine Gail Baer (née Josephine Gail Kleinberg; born Aug 7, 1929) is an American painter associated with minimalist artist.

Beverly Pepper (née Stoll; Dec 20, 1922 – Feb 5, 2020) was an American sculptor known for her monumental works, site specific and land art. She remained independent from any particular art movement.

Edwina Leapman was born in 1934 in Hampshire, England and studied at the Slade School and Central School of Arts in London. She was drawn to abstract painting in the late 1950s, but her interest in abstraction was informed by painting from New York of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Mary Obering (1937 – July 29, 2022) was an American painter focusing mainly on geometric abstraction.

11 Female Artists Who Were Pioneering Minimalists, by Meredith Mendelsohn

www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-11-female-minimalists-you-should-know

[worldsandemanations]

Edwina Leapman, Steel on Deep Turquoise, (acrylic on canvas), 2005

[ruiard]

Edwina Leapman - A Paler Violet Blue

Acrylic on canvas, 122 × 137 cm, 2013

[polkadotmotmot]

Edwina Leapman - With Pink, 2013

[stevesilver]

EDWINA LEAPMAN

Pale Shards

2007

acrylic on canvas

72 x 66 in

183 x 167 cm

[femmesfollesnebraska]

Blog at 40, Liza Lou at 40

This is the fourth blog post I’ve written on what (feminist and/or women) artists have done/created during their 40th year during my 40th year. First 3:

1) Judy Chicago

2) Carolee Schneemann

3) Wanda Ewing

I include artworks by myself inspired by and/or in tribute to the artists at end of each post as well.

Today I write about Liza Lou, (born 1969), American visual artist best known for her large scale sculptures using glass beads.  Though not currently an artist on the top of my inspiration list, as much of her work leans primarily on the more conceptual side of the spectrum--though not entirely, to be sure--I came across her work the other day as I was researching what contemporary artists are doing in response to the pandemic for an upcoming presentation, and found her Apartogether project.

Screenshot of an Instagram post by Liza Lou announcing the start of Apartogether in response to Covid-19, 2020.

Apartogether is a community art project founded by Liza Lou at the onset of the COVID19 pandemic to foster connection and creativity during a time of social distancing and isolation.  Lou encourages IG followers to make work from familiar materials around the house and to tag it with the Instagram handle @apartogether_art and she archives it on her website. What started as an exercise in combatting long-term isolation has grown into a global community of makers eager to share. She also hosts art talks, a “sew-in” and sessions on Zoom to facilitate conversation among the participants.  As an accessible, open art project, I completely love this - anyone can participate, and everyone can view and appreciate this project. It’s warm, intimate, personal while also being enormous, inspirational and broadly impactful. I can’t help compare to Judy Chicago’s Honor Quilt from The Dinner Party, a crowdsourced quilt made from patches from people worldwide dedicated to women past to present, famous to non, that traveled with the famous work throughout its international tour in the 1980s, but I digress.

Speaking of Chicago, while doing my current research, I found an Op-ed for the New York Times she wrote about the significance of work with content; she articulated everything about her and feminist art that I love now and always have:

Does art matter when we are facing a global crisis such as the current Covid-19 pandemic?

Obviously, there is a great deal of art that doesn’t matter. This includes the work issuing from those university art programs that every year pump out thousands of graduates, taught only to speak in tongues about formal, conceptual and theoretical issues few people care about or can comprehend. Then there is the art created for a global market that has convinced too many people that a piece’s selling price is more important than the content it conveys.

But when art is meaningful and substantive, viewers can become enlightened, inspired and empowered. And this can lead to change, which we urgently need. 

...One might ask what this has to do with the global pandemic afflicting us. The answer lies in art’s power to shed light on the problems we are confronted with at this difficult time.  

...Art that raises awareness of the state of our planet can be especially important in today’s world. One example of this is the work of the contemporary artist and illustrator Sue Coe, whose pieces on animal mistreatment have been ignored or, at best, marginalized by an art community that seems to privilege meaninglessness over consequential work...

(I can’t express how much I love Judy Chicago’s adamant voice. It is so assertively, unapologetically and refreshingly personal and feminist. I highlly recommend reading her books and autobiographies - a new combined edition is actually coming out next year. Also, I currently have her book, New Views, which I’m stoked about starting and reviewing...but I digress, again!)

The point in my bringing this quote up around Liza Lou is that her work created during her 40th year, 2009, Book of Days, leans conceptual.

Liza Lou. Book of Days, Paper and glass beads.

I say “leans,” because, to make an obvious (and unfair) comparison: viewing Book of Days, without context, versus viewing this Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a monumental work with 39 place-settings dedicated to women in Western art history (which Chicago debuted her 40th year, read my blog post here), there is clear content beyond the media with the latter, where the former emphasizes the media. Of course, Dinner Party’s media is very important, and Book of Days does have content beyond the media; its just immediate objective response in comparison is content vs. media. Which, is what Chicago was referring to in her editorial.

My preference typically leans towards feminist art with immediate content impact; as evidenced in my posts on Carolee Schneemann and Wanda Ewing. I haven’t thought about Liza Lou in years; in fact, Ewing was the one to introduce me to her work when I made a series of self portraits using beads (see below). Notably Lou is known for this work, which I love, Kitchen:

Liza Lou: Kitchen, 1994 (c) Liza Lou

Kitchen is a full-scaled kitchen Lou covered, over a five year period, with glistening beads. Lou created this piece after researching the lives of 19th women and kitchen design; the made plans, crafted objects out of paper mâché, painted them, and applied the beads in a mosaic of surface pattern. This work, in Lou’s words, “argues for the dignity of labor”—a labor that here manifests as process and subject, and is linked to gender, since crafts and kitchen work are traditionally female domains.  Some of the popular branded kitchen products depicted also might  comment on American life. Of course I can make a comparison to Chicago’s The Dinner Party, too, using the dinner table/traditional feminine media (ceramics/quilting) to honor these typically deemed inferior media. Or pop art, of course. Lou’s stands on its own--less reverential --more playful, inviting, fun and even personal (Lou did it all herself whereas Chicago had 400+ volunteers; Lou dedicates this to the all-encompassing woman; Chicago to specific though broad reaching women); both with extremely detailed thought, research and planning. 

I didn’t mean for this to be a comparison of Chicago to Lou - but, it is how I’ve been thinking these last couple days--because, to bring it back to Lou’s Book of Days, this work can be viewed as more akin to minimalist work--one can guess what it means--a tall, stack of beaded forms depicting paper--beautiful, white, simple--maybe you think of other such minimalist works that make you aware of your environment such as Mary Corse’ White Inner Bands (2000) made of glass microspheres inside acrylic canvas. I imagine as you move around Lou’s stack of beaded objects, the beads sparkler or shimmer, femininizing the perhaps stale environment. Or perhaps think of the intense linework of Edwina Leapman. Like the laborous line-making of Leapman, so is the intricate beadwork of Lou.

As such, Book of Days, like Kitchen, points to labor, containment, and womanhood in a beautiful, perhaps more subtle way. To be sure, Book of Days includes 365 beaded sheets - the days in a year, completed her 40th year. Making literal cognitive and/or physical aging, perhaps? Perhaps....

Back to viewing it as an object - no context on the wall, no intent known. Is such work, sans clear feminist intent, feminist? Or would it just be meaningless work such as that Chicago points to in her article, lacking educational value?  It is, in fact, feminist regardless. A woman making work, taking up space, is, in itself, political and a feminist statement. As women have been left off the walls, books and pages of history the majority of time and still are underrepresented (minorities even more), anything a woman (broadly defined) makes and is on view, is feminist in itself, clearly evoking social justice intent, or not.

To be sure - I don’t know, but I think Chicago would agree. To note as well, much of her work has minimalist aesthetics, as her training was such.

Here are a few of my older works, made with beads, inspired by Liza Lou:

Sally Brown Deskins: Babylove, beads and yarn on silk, 2007

Sally Brown Deskins: Self portrait with beads, pastel on black paper, 2008

Sally Brown Deskins: Heidi Clock - beads and yarn on a clock (I wish I had a better photo of this - it was donated and sold at an auction at the Bemis Center in 2008 or 2009; the purchaser told me she thought it was the “most authentic clock in the room” (all of the art was clocks)

-Sally Brown Deskins

IG @sallery_art

~

Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Brown Deskins.  LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.

Submissions always open!

https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing

[lsmithart]

FURTHER VISUAL/PROCESS RESEARCH: Contemporary Women Artists Book

Kathy Muchlemann, Mesmerized, 1986:

Edwina Leapman, Dark Green Painting, 1986:

Joan Mitchell, Faded Air 1, 1985:

Rebecca Purdum, In Three’s, 1985:

Katherine Porter, Stars Hide Your Fires, 1986:

I took out a few more books featuring contemporary women artists and found these works to be very relevant to my practice ideas. Edwina Leapman and Joan Mitchell’s work in particular feel helpful to refer to in terms of their processes of creating abstract paintings. Their use of layering the paint is something I plan to emulate within my own work. I will therefore need to  consider these two artists and their processes as I continue to make painting works.

REFERENCES:

Beckett, W. (1988). Contemporary Women Artists. Oxford: Phaidon, pp.55, 67, 71, 87, 89.

[mitakuye-oyasinn]

Edwina Leapman Untitled, 2012

[irenelichtensteinblog]

Edwina Leapman. Untitled, 2012

[garadinervi]

Edwina Leapman, Untitled, (acrylic on canvas), 2012 [Annely Juda Fine Art, London. © Edwina Leapman]

[abstrakshun]

Edwina Leapman (British, b.1931)

[worldsandemanations]

Edwina Leapman, Violet on Brown Violet

[ruiard]

Edwina Leapman - Untitled

Acrylic on linen, 183 × 168 cm, ca. 1979

[lsmithart]

All artists to consider in relation to my practice for this project (list ongoing):

Repetition Artists:

https://www.widewalls.ch/repetition-in-art-artists-photography/

Piet Mondrian -  relevant - concept of breaking down objects to create forms etc

Yayoi Kusama

Frank Stella

https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/minimalism/serial-forms-and-repetition/

Jayne Wilton - https://www.artsy.net/search?term=jayne%20wilton - most relevant

Louise Bourgeois - insomnia drawings / the repetitive nature of the revisiting of her childhood

https://www.artsy.net/show/joanna-bryant-and-julian-page-joanna-bryant-and-julian-page-at-london-original-print-fair-2017

Richard Serra

Ellen Gallagher - most relevant

Rachel Whiteread - also mark making - most relevant

Memory / personal experience artists:

Mark Leckey

Whitney McVeigh - most relevant (demonstrates notion of memory through her process/practice)

Louise Bourgeois - most relevant (personal experience, repetition in process, evident memory in work) - ‘What is the Shape of this Problem?’ ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ in collab with Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin - most relevant (Strangeland book in terms of text; exploring past experiences)

Sophie Calle - most relevant (exploration of personal emotional experiences through her work)

Performative / abstract painters:

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art/painting-and-performance

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/12/a-bigger-splash-painting-performance

Jackson Pollock - most relevant

Georges Mathieu

Yves Klein - most relevant

Shozo Shimamoto

Helena Almeida - https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/oct/07/helena-almeida-portugal-artist

Ingrid Calame - most relevant

Joan Mitchell - most relevant

Cathy Wilkes - most relevant

Callum Innes - most relevant

Christian Hetzel - most relevant

Mark making / trace artists:

Richard Long

Monika Gryzmala

Oscar Murillo - most relevant

Sarah Cullen - most relevant

Mark Sheinkman - relevant

Julie Mehretu - relevant

Ingrid Calame - most relevant

Claude Heath - most relevant

Silvia Bachli - also repetition - most relevant

Tania Kovats - most relevant

Edwina Leapman - also abstract paint and personal experience - most relevant

Catherine Bertola - most relevant

Poets (all relevant):

Rupi Kaur

Sylvia Plath

Wilder Poetry

Process:

Louise Hopkins

Christian Hetzel - most relevant - mixed media painting

Maria Wigley - most relevant - stitch writing/typewriter/photographs

Layout / installation:

Joseph Grigely (Blueberry Surprise)

Daniel Guzman

[garadinervi]

Edwina Leapman, Burnt Orange on Blue Umber, (acrylic on canvas), 2004 [Annely Juda Fine Art, London. © Edwina Leapman]