Audrey Flack By: Jim Lane Marilyn (Vanitas) by Audrey Flack 96"x96", 1977, oil (Click on picture for more of (artist's) work.)

One of the "dirty little secrets" of the art world is the degree to which painters, especially painters of realism, use projected images to guarantee a portrait likeness or photographic verisimilitude. There are several good reasons they choose not to admit, or at least not to PUBLICIZE this quite valid drawing technique (too many to go into here and now). However there are a few brave souls out there who make no bones about the fact that they draw and paint from slides. One of them is Audrey Flack. Born in 1931, she studied in all the right schools, paid her dues painting unappreciated figurative paintings during the Abstract Expressionist fifties, and has suffered all the slings and arrows of being a female artist during times when female artists were viewed as little more than hobbyists. After the Pop era, near the end of the sixties, when Photo-realism began to rise to prominence, she was ahead of the game. She'd been doing them for years. She caught the brass ring and has held on, rising to the top of her field painting and sculpting in a manner that has brought her respect from every segment of the ART world and the REAL world as well.

A typical Audrey Flack painting is World War II (Vanitas). Okay, before we get into the painting, what does "vanitas" mean? It derives from sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch painting in which still-life items are chosen and arranged to make the viewer contemplate the "vanities" and fleeting qualities of life leading ultimately to death. Flack's 1976-77 painting is a vibrantly colored still-life of elegant vermeil tea cups, saucers, serving dishes, and candlesticks, pearls, inviting candies, an heirloom pocket watch, a fragile but beautiful butterfly, lit candle, and rose, all arrayed upon a painted version of Margaret Bourke-White's famous, horrific photograph, The Living Dead of Buchenwald. It's trompe l'oeil realism further enforces the illusion that the still-life items were things momentarily abandoned, yet never to be seen again by those who lost their lives in the Holocaust concentration camps--hence the vanitas element.

A more recent example of her vanitas painting, Marilyn Vanitas, (pictured above) is a poignant tribute to Marilyn Monroe. Her favorite still-life elements are all present, the burning candle, photographs, lipstick, flowers, glassware, and beads, but here they're married to a painted sepia photograph of the fifties movie queen reflected imperfectly in a mirror, symbolizing the imperfection of our view of the quintessential sex symbol of all time. All the symbolic elements of vanitas painting are present too, where time is of the essence, the pocket watch, the hourglass, the temporal beauty of the rose, the ripe and overripe fruit, the half-burned candle, and most off all the makeup used, not just by Marilyn, but all who would make an attempt to hide the ravages of time reflected in our ever-present mirrors

Today, Audrey Flack no longer paints. Se teaches, and writes, but as much as anything, she seems now more interested in sculpture. In 1992, she won an international competition and was commissioned by the Portuguese-American group called the Friends of Queen Catherine to design a fitting monument to the wife of England's King Charles II (who captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch). The borough of Queens was named for her. What Flack has come up with is a one-million-dollar, six-story tall bust of the queen, second in size only to the Statue of Liberty, to be installed on the shore of the East River in Queens (just across from the United Nations). An early, full-figure, version, First Maquette for Queen Catherine of Braganza, can be seen by clicking on the painting above.

As the project progressed, she exhibited various models for the work designed to be a symbol of the strength and humanity of this enlightened monarch. However, just last year, the project was put on hold while a new location for the sculpture is found. It seems that a group of African-American residence of Queens has raised objections to the monument on the grounds that both the Portuguese and English side of the queen's family were involved in the slave trade. In spite of the fact that research has shown no evidence that Queen Catherine ever owned slaves, and the fact that her will left a sum of money to free slaves (presumably not her own in that no money would have been necessary to free her own slaves), the African American community has remained adamant that the statue NOT be built in Queens. What has ensued is a battle of the ethnics coupled with the NIMBY factor (Not In MY Back Yard). Caught in the middle, there is little Flack can do but wait until the political and ethnic dust settles. In the meantime, anyone want a good, six-story tall queen for their back yard?

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowlegable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html