Friday, December 19, 2014

Portrait Of American Female Artist Alison Van Pelt

By Lucia Weeks


The famous, talented American Female Artist was born on Sept. 16, 1963, in Hollywood, in the State of California. Alison Van Pelt grew up in the city of Los Angeles, California, and her talents developed as she's growing up. She decided to be an artist.

She began her art education in the 1970s and ended up attending 5 different educational institutes. Four of them are in the United States, and the 5th one is in Italy. These institutes were UCLA, the University of California, Otis Parsons Art Institute, the University of California, the Italian one being Florence Academy.

During the 1970s, her artistic skills truly began to blossom. Coming up of age in the 70s open-minded social climate, her photorealist painting style was welcomed among art fans and critics of the era- the era of the assimilation of photography into the art world. The welcoming of her unique style was evocative of that specific era.

She had inspiration and influence from many other painters, like Agnes Martin, Helmut Newton, Robert Rauschenberg, Paramahansa Yogananda, Yayoi Kusama, Dan Millman and Hunter S. Thompson. Their motivation and influence encouraged and inspired her, and she gradually evolved her personal, style, unique. She learned the way to paint and adapt the images of figures or subjects and the way she would treat them. She evolved her own methods through experience, and discovered the unique process which is up till today still hers. Her beautiful, mystical, and deliberately-degraded interpretation of subject, always came up with her own ideas to the process conclusion.

She developed her own veritable painstaking techniques, and her passion was often the motivation for working despite all the pains of producing her technical miracles. This revealed the human, yet mysterious works she came up with. She would begin by possibly looking at particular photograph, or another image or picture which would have intrigued her, and maybe draw using hand first, or paint a realistic-style portrait. The complex obscuring technique over the original painting was her final, unique process.

Of course, her works have been exhibited in galleries as the only artist in Europe and North America. Her unique paintings were shown in The Drayton Art Institute and Fresno Art Museum. Her creations are also in public collections such as the Armand Hammer Museum, Jumex Foundation in Mexico City, Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She now resides and works in the city of Santa Monica, California.

At a distance, many of her images may first appear hazy, as if they may have been photographed through a mist of some kind. This alters as you get closer, and as you draw nearer, you start to notice vertical lines, and then weaving horizontal lines emerge.

When critiquing the artwork of the very gifted American female artist, critics have most often considered it to be "abstract" art. In response to that observations of general art viewers, Van Pelt has claimed the abstract process as her way of essentially blending, or "merging" the tradition of contemporary abstraction with portraiture. The question of whether the figures in the paintings are either stepping forth into the tangible world or are they veritably receding into the depths of the canvas. The renown artist herself has never really replied to the particular question with any tangible or direct answer; instead, she sequentially leaves the answer up to the viewer.




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