Sunday, March 23, 2014

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

While researching the of a dinner party I found many references to Judy Chicago's  The Dinner Party.  I decided to research this work and have posted pictures and text about the work from the Brooklyn Museum.





The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago is an icon of feminist art, which represents 1,038 women in history—39 women are represented by place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests. This monumental work of art is comprised of a triangular table divided by three wings, each 48 feet long.

The principal component of The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet arranged in the shape of an open triangle—a symbol of equality—measuring forty-eight feet on each side with a total of thirty-nine place settings. The "guests of honor" commemorated on the table are designated by means of intricately embroidered runners, each executed in a historically specific manner. Upon these are placed, for each setting, a gold ceramic chalice and utensils, a napkin with an embroidered edge, and a fourteen-inch china-painted plate with a central motif based on butterfly and vulvar forms. Each place setting is rendered in a style appropriate to the individual woman being honored.
Wing One of the table begins in prehistory with the Primordial Goddess and continues chronologically with the development of Judaism; it then moves to early Greek societies to the Roman Empire, marking the decline in women's power, signified by Hypatia's place setting. Wing Two represents early Christianity through the Reformation, depicting women who signify early expressions of the fight for equal rights, from Marcella to Anna van Schurman. Wing Three begins with Anne Hutchinson and addresses the American Revolution, Suffragism, and the movement toward women's increased individual creative expression, symbolized at last by Georgia O'Keeffe.
The Dinner Party rests upon the Heritage Floor, which is an equilateral triangle forty-eight feet on each side. This monumental floor is comprised of 2,300 hand-cast porcelain tiles and provides both a structural and metaphorical support for The Dinner Party table. Inscribed in gold luster are the names of 999 mythical and historical women of achievement, who were selected to contextualize the 39 women represented in the place settings and to convey "how many women had struggled into prominence or been able to make their ideas known—sometimes in the face of overwhelming obstacles—only (like the women on the table) to have their hard-earned a chievements marginalized or erased" 

Aftermath of a dinner party

For my thesis painting I have stretched a ten foot by five foot canvas.  On the canvas I have an idea that I want to paint the interior of a home after it has been ravaged by guests after a night of merriment.  I am still uncertain if I will be incorporating the figure or referencing the figure through objects and view point.  The works below are paintings that I have looked at that that have inspired me to create a painting of what the setting looks like after all the figures dissipate from it.

Edvard Munch, At The Dinner Table

 Lucien Adrion, The Dinner of Artists Making up by Monsieur and Madame Paul Petrides
 Augustus Renoir, Luncheon off the Boating Party
Jules Alexandre Grun, The End of Dinner

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Figure or references to a figure?

Struggling with whether I should keep the figures in my work or if I should take them out.  Below is my first attempt at a painting with not figure…

Byblos