CONTENTS
Editors’ Letter | 6-7
Artist Features & Interviews
AJ Casson | 48-51
Andrea Modica | 64-69
Brigette Bloom | 70-75
Corinne Vionnet | 32-37
Elise Ansel |40-45
Emily Thompson | 102-111
George Quaintance | 76-79
Jeremy Schlangen | 52-55
Manjari Sharma | 8-13
Nadia Sablin | 24-29
Patrick McNabb | 56-61
Sarah Palmer | 80-83
Yigal Ozeri | 18-23
Editorials
Cold Spring | 130-139
Into The Woods | 92-101
Juxtapose |112-121
Nature Desired | 102-111
Out to Sea | 122-129
Artist Index | 152
Supporters | 153
Contributing Editors
Stephanie Berzon
Taaron Sundby
Contributing Photographers
Ashley Soong
Christina Arza
Matthew Herrmann
Taea Thale
Zoë McGee
Contributing Writers
Ashley Catharine Smith
Emanuele Tibaldo
Nickolas Krause
Richard Leslie
Taaron Sundby
The Square Project
Tony Arza
On the Front & Back Cover
Original Design by Roze Hooij
www.rozehooij.com
Advertisement Inquiries
[email protected]
Subscription Inquiries
[email protected]
Roze Hooij is a Dutch graphic designer
and art director living and working in
Sydney, Australia. Her work is dedicated
to print, typography and textile design in
the fields of fashion, art and advertising.
Issue No. 3 Artist Submissions
[email protected]
www.steadfastarte.com
Follow us on Instagram
@steadfastmagazine
Printed in the USA by Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, Kentucky
Steadfast Magazine is published bi-annually by Steadfast Arte, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be copied,
produced or transmitted in any form without the publisher’s written permission.
Christina Arza: How does literature influence your work?
ELISE ANSEL
Elise Ansel: My work involves translating historical paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. The ideas of translation and transcription are influenced by my background in Comparative Literature. As a Comparative
Literature concentrator at Brown University, I was introduced to the idea of
intertextuality, an acknowledged process according to which new texts bearing independent meanings are transposed from pre-existing texts. Further,
upon reading James Joyce’s translation of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey
into his modernist masterpiece Ulysses, I was inspired not only by the use of
a classical text to create a contemporary work, but also by the idea of using
multiple stylistic approaches within a single work. The final Penelope/Molly
Bloom chapter particularly struck me, a single unpunctuated stream of consciousness meditation written in a “female voice.” It became clear that the scope of translation and transcription could extend beyond translation between
modern languages or even between ancient and contemporary languages to
include translation between privileged and less privileged discourses. When
I made the decision to use painting as my first order medium, I became interested in examining how these ideas could be applied to the Visual Arts. I’ve
always been an avid reader. I particularly love literary fiction, and I feel that
the ideas and inspiration I glean from books feeds into my work.
CA:Would you say your work coincides with the beliefs of the Neo-Romanticism Art Movement?
EA: I had never really thought about it before but yes, my work is very much
in accord with Romanticism’s emphasis on individual experience, the originality of the artist, the subjective, nature and the sublime. Also, in the same
way that Romanticism was a reaction against Naturalism and the rational
and ordered thought of the Enlightenment, my work, which is about celebrating depth of feeling, emotional connectivity, the sense of touch, and individual human experience, is a reaction against the type of vapid academic
formalism that considers emotional distance an aesthetic virtue instead of
what it actually is, which is a psychological disease.
CA: Do you have a favorite quote from a book or poem that you seem to
always come back to?
EA: I always come back to the last six words of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I
said yes I will Yes.” Sometimes the end of T. S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J
Alfred Prufrock” sometimes drifts through my mind: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each…Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
This is a brilliant poem and I think it is significant for artists trying to follow
their intuition. Langston Hughes is also an important poet to me and I particularly think of “We Wear The Mask” and “Hold Fast to Dreams.” I put “Of
Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens in a catalogue of my work because I think it
very accurately describes what I am trying to achieve in my paintings which
is a type of visual thinking that goes beyond words, names and labels, and
that can lead to an experience of the sublime.
CA: I love the movement in your paintings; it is as if they have their own
souls. Can you describe how you came to discover your style of painting? Interview by Christina Arza
A contemporary oil painter and her modernized classical works
40
EA: I studied modern dance when I was younger and I have always tried to to
bring the energy and dynamism of dance, movement and music into the act
of painting. One of the ways I do this is through the use of gesture. Sometimes people identify my work with Abstract Expressionism, and while artists
such as Guston, DeKooning, Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell are important
to me, my paintings are actually more indebted to artists working in Europe
today such as Frank Auerbach, Per Kirkeby, Gerhard Richter, Howard Hodgkins, Katy Moran and Nina Kluth; and also to historical artists who use a
sense of gesture in their drawings, such as Rembrandt. Frank Auerbach has
been particularly important to me; he talks about the importance of anchoring your work in concrete, perceptual experience while “freeing the possibilities of improvisation which contain the mysteries.” Gesture and movement
are my point of access into improvisation.
CA: What was your thesis in your MFA degree?
EA: My MFA thesis exhibition was comprised of a large “black” monochrome painting and twelve abstract intaglio prints that were created
using multiple plates and a combination of aquatint, sugarlift, etching
and dry point techniques. There was actually a painting I had made after
Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne underneath the “black” monochrome but it
was subsequently buried beneath multiple layers of transparent glazes as
its emotional and narrative qualities didn’t accord with the programmatic
hegemony of formalism that was prevalent in the program I went to. In
retrospect, the painting I made after Titian was the most important thing I
did in graduate school and continues to inform the work I am doing today. CA: What are you currently working on?
EA: I am currently working on a series of paintings based on Vermeer’s A
Young Woman Standing at A Virginal. These paintings will be part of my
forthcoming exhibition Fusion of Horizons, which will open at Cadogan
Contemporary in London on Dec. 1. A painter I have a tremendous respect for had sent me a postcard with this painting on it. I was rereading
the postcard and holding it and looking at it and thinking “Oh that’s so
kind that he sent me an image of a woman with clothes on engaged in an
intellectual and creative act” when all of a sudden it exploded in my mind
and I understood it to be the key not only to what I was trying to get at in
my work but also how to make that work. The key is the geometry, which
is the way to anchor and organize all of the delicious, luscious, luminous,
wet paint, and therefore capacitates the use of paint in this very sensual,
subjective, emotional, spontaneous, improvisational and physical way I
like to work. CA: Did you do a lot of research on Vermeer and his life before beginning
this series?
EA: No, I didn’t do any research on Vermeer. My series is about a personal, subjective, and intuitive reaction to Vermeer’s painting, and using his
painting as the material necessary to creating new and original paintings
of my own. Interestingly, working after the Vermeer gave me greater insight into Van Gogh, Mondrian, and DeKooning.
CA: If you could sit down with a writer or painter from the Romanticism
period who would it be?
EA: John Constable. CA: What are your feelings on the idea of nature vs. technology? EA: I think both Nature and Technology are important and I think we
need to strive for a balance where both can be celebrated, utilized constructively and incorporated into daily experience and where one doesn’t
cancel the other out. I understand that the pendulum swings, and that the
predominance of technology in today’s (art) world is causing interest in it’s
opposite to rise. I am a person who enjoys sensual experience, emotional
connectivity, and the sublime. I find great restorative and rejuvenate power
in nature, and my painting reflects this proclivity. I think what happens in
a lifetime of painting is that every now and then the way the pendulum
is swinging coincides with the type of work you are doing, and for me,
that is very fortunately happening right now. But what is most important
is to be Steadfast in your commitment to your vision no matter what the
pendulum is doing.
CA: What does the word Steadfast mean to you?
EA: The word Steadfast means perseverance, perspicacity and holding fast
to one’s intuitive direction; essentially, finding one’s true north and sticking with it. It’s a terrific name for a magazine about art.