VINEYARD cites
november 2017
the women of the
Abstract Expressionist
Movement as inspir-ing
her work. Among
the many artists she
mentions as influential
are Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and
Grace Hartigan.
For most art lovers, a reference to Abstract
Expressionism calls to mind artists like
Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem
de Kooning. While the movement became
irrevocably connected to a version of mascu-linity
that defined 20th-century U.S. culture,
many female artists contributed to and
advanced the first uniquely American art
movement.
The Palm Springs Art Museum referenced
this missing history for their exhibition of
the groundbreaking artists earlier this year:
“As part of a circle of painters known as
Abstract Expressionists, they helped forge
the first fully American modern art move-ment.
Though women actively participated
alongside men in the studios, clubs, and
exhibitions, textbook accounts of the move-ment
tell the story through the work of a
handful of male artists. In fact, the image of
the paint-splattered, heroic male artist has
come to characterize the movement as a
whole. … Until recently, their involvement
has been under-reported and their canvases
undervalued. Yet their authentic expressions
belong front and center in the accounts of
abstract expressionism.”
The influence of these female painters
is visible in many of Vineyard’s paintings through the contrast
between background and foreground, line and brushstroke
quality, and the high color contrast she employs.
In her works like “The Big Chill” and “Begone,” Vineyard reflects
the vibrancy of abstract expressionism as the critic Harold
Rosenberg described it: “At a certain moment the canvas began
to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in
which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design,
analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What
was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
In “Begone,” a 30 x 30-inch work of acrylic on canvas, Vineyard
draws attention to the stroke of brush on the surface. By
employing only variations of white, gray and black and a single
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66
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