Ellen Altfest is a realist painter based in New York, she received an MFA from Yale University and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Altfest always paints from life, drawn towards domestic plants, vegetables and male models. Altfest immerses herself in an intense analysis and personal engagement with the subject that pushes her vision beyond the real.
Ellen Altfest has become a highly regarded painter over the last decade for painstakingly labor-intensive canvases that look at things in the world — cactuses, tumbleweeds , rusted pipes, intimate expanses of men’s bodies- with an intensity that takes Ruskin’s exhortation to learn from nature, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” to levels that might have turned Ruskin to abstraction. In Altfest’s rendering of a gourd, no wrinkle or spot, of many thousands, goes unrecorded. In her view of a male armpit, every hair, stretch mark, pore and visible blood vessel that she observed in months of sitting inches from a model are there, tipping the real almost into the uncanny.
Head and Plant
2009-2010
10 x 11 in. (25.4 x 27.9 cm)
Oil on canvas
The Bent Leg
2008
8 x 12 in. (20.3 x 30.5 cm)
Oil on canvas
Interview with Ellen Altfest:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/AYdsA4tlFRI[/youtube]
Linda Nochlin is an American art historian, a writer, and professor. She is known for her ground-breaking work to advance the cause of women artists, beginning as early as 1971 with her article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Sparking a major development in art history and criticism, that early work led to the 1976 exhibition, Women Artists: 1550-1950, which Nochlin curated with Anne Sutherland Harris for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the show was accompanied by the catalogue of the same title co-authored by both scholars. Nochlin has written numerous books and articles focusing our attention on social and political issues revealed in the work of artists, both male and female, from the modernist period to the present day. Her books: Representing Women, The Body in Pieces, Women, Art, and Power, and The Politics of Vision have directed and expanded the dialogue among art historians on the nature of viewing and have broadened the scope of our interpretation of the role of art and artists in society.
