Artist Research

Vija Celmins 

Vija Celmins is an Lavtvian American artist, she is very well known for realism photo’s and drawings of natural environment such as; the ocean, sea life and many other things which are close to her. Some of her earlier work included sculptures, and monochromatic realistic paintings. Her work became very popular and she is now a well known contemporary style artist.

The picture I have chosen to look further into is inserted below; I chose to look more into this picture because I think it relates well to the next exercise and I can get inspiration to enhance my next piece of work.

This piece of work was done using charcoal, I think this work stands out because she really captures the essence of the soft clouds, it shows off the difficulty of defining each cloud individually. She has an excellent way of making each cloud individual yet they all looked mixed into one at the same time, it is such a realism piece because that is exactly how it looks on a cloudy day. I love the way she has used different tones throughout the piece to show the different shapes and shades of the clouds. I imagine it would be really difficult to display such an intricate lot scene such as clouds so this piece really does stand out to me.

Looking more into her work I see how realistic she makes her work look, her art almost looks like a picture and the two would easily get mixed up. I love how she can capture a sky and make it look so realistic as well as light just like you see when you look at clouds. I have definitely taken inspiration from this piece of work to use on my next exercise and it’s got me excited to experiment in the same way.