multimedia – Cleveland State Art

Vija Celmins is a multimedia artist who uses charcoal, paint, several printing processes, and graphite. She is more known for her paintings which is what quickly caught people’s attention and gave her rise to fame. She has mastered the art of painting as she pays remarkable attention to detail, so much so that she will spend months to over a year on one small painting. Patience with her work is so unique that she will redo paintings several times until they are to her liking. She paints over the existing painting or sands over the top of it creating layers even if the layers do not show through, she believes it adds a sense of depth and memory to the painting. While she tends to paint an image from a photograph she will tweak the image to her liking on canvas. She is sensationally attracted to void like images and will not paint an object, that is on a photograph, that could obstruct the feeling of that void. Her recent works have had low colorization as if only painting in values of black and white. Even though her work seems to have a deep meaning and a sense of connection to her they do not. This can not be said to viewers of her work who frequently become emotionally connected to a piece for displaying their feelings on a wall as if looking into a mirror of their deepest emotions. She is also known for recreating her works over and over again using different mediums. She creates a different view with every creation because some mediums bring more detail to the picture while others lessen the detail. Recreating a work with lithograph or other print process transforms the original piece into a completely different image.

This first image is one of her earlier works from nineteen sixty-four were she would just paint objects in the room of her work place. This particular piece was created with oil paint on canvas.

This painting, along with the rest of its’ series, is one of the few paintings that she used bright colors compared to most of her other works. The detail she is able to portray using acrylic and bronze paint is out of this world, it is no wonder why she is known for mastering painting. She has a collection of rocks that appear similar to these with the detailed speckles. The painting below of the night sky pairs a hefty resemblance to the appearance of the rocks if they were zoomed in with a camera.

In her series of Night Sky paintings she will take about one year to finish one painting, and there are several layers painted over top of one another.

Here is just one of the beautiful examples of how she will create another painting using the same image

This is one of her lithography works that most likely will have a sister creation. All of her work have similarities to one another even if they are in a different series.

Some of her spider webs in its’ series she uses charcoal and eraser, but this one was created with oil on linen.