evolve: How did you come to do art? What brought you to start painting?
EV: When I was five years old, I was drawing all the time, so my parents gave me a book called “Masterpieces for Young People”. I poured over paintings by Botticelli and Raphael and all the masters like other kids do with children’s books. They told stories to me. It made a huge impression and I still have the tattered old book. My father colored one of my drawings, framed it and hung it in the living room. My parents encouraged me from a very young age, so I've always thought I was going to be an artist.
e: What made you so interested in those old masters and how they were painting?
EV: I don’t know why the passion for the old masters was in me. It just was and still is. I can swoon at the paint strokes of a Velásquez or the beauty in the lines of a Da Vinci drawing. Some people worship other things like athletic skills and music. For me it’s always been painting, sculpture and drawing. The classic masters appear to have been the height of those art forms or at least a good reference point if you want to get good. There are very accomplished wonderful paintings being made today, like David Hockney and so many others but Titian and Velasquez, those guys are the highest height of art aptitude for me. I know that I'm not there nor will I ever be. But sometimes, looking at their paintings and reading their words, I get to feel a little tiny bit every so often of what it feels like to paint like them and that’s enough for me.
An interview with the painter Edith Vonnegut
We were able to issue this edition with the work of American painter Edith Vonnegut. We talked to her about the concerns of her art.
evolve: How did you come to do art? What brought you to start painting?
EV: When I was five years old, I was drawing all the time, so my parents gave me a book called “Masterpieces for Young People”. I poured over paintings by Botticelli and Raphael and all the masters like other kids do with children’s books. They told stories to me. It made a huge impression and I still have the tattered old book. My father colored one of my drawings, framed it and hung it in the living room. My parents encouraged me from a very young age, so I've always thought I was going to be an artist.
e: What made you so interested in those old masters and how they were painting?
EV: I don’t know why the passion for the old masters was in me. It just was and still is. I can swoon at the paint strokes of a Velásquez or the beauty in the lines of a Da Vinci drawing. Some people worship other things like athletic skills and music. For me it’s always been painting, sculpture and drawing. The classic masters appear to have been the height of those art forms or at least a good reference point if you want to get good. There are very accomplished wonderful paintings being made today, like David Hockney and so many others but Titian and Velasquez, those guys are the highest height of art aptitude for me. I know that I'm not there nor will I ever be. But sometimes, looking at their paintings and reading their words, I get to feel a little tiny bit every so often of what it feels like to paint like them and that’s enough for me.
e: A lot of your paintings have this kind of mythic quality to them. Why do you use mythical or mythological imagery, like mermaids and angels?
EV: There have always been winged creatures in all of art. Images of them today are often corny and cloyingly sentimental like bad Hallmark cards. But my first loves were Raphael, Botticelli and Da Vinci, and they painted angels. So if they thought they were appropriate to paint back then, why can't I keep at it in the 21st century? There are many people who believe angels are out there and sometimes I believe they are too. It’s highly likely there are realms we can’t see.
e: You also paint a lot of women, in all kinds of ways. Why is that?
EV: First of all, I am a woman and this is all I know. I want to change the way women are perceived. The misrepresentation goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. I made an image of that with the words beneath, “Eve. The first victim of fake news propaganda. Accused of ruining everything in the Garden of Eden. When all she was doing was reaching for some knowledge, they should have thanked her.” All the paintings that I really loved of Rubens and Raphael and Velasquez, showed women laying around naked, doing nothing. They had no vigor, no muscles and no discernible intelligence. They're beautiful, but that's not the reality for women, especially mothers. After I had my two kids, I saw motherhood as more like the Marines. An extremely vigilant lifestyle where you have to be ready to jump into action at any moment with a clear head and nerves of steel. I’m painting from a female trajectory, trying to make up for false representation.
e: I read on your website that you want to herald the unheralded and bring majesty to the mundane. Can you say what you mean by that?
EV: Ordinary people aren’t given Academy Awards or Nobel Prizes for doing the laundry and raising children and all those bazillions of other relentless everyday chores. When I found myself being a full-time housewife and mother, I could relate and decided to give them some glory and importance. Marie Antoinette and Napoleon could pay people to make them look fabulous, but ordinary people can’t do that. The minimum wage essential workers weren’t about to spend their money commissioning someone to paint them looking fabulous. But why not honor them and make them look wonderful for the thankless underpaid work they do in the middle of a pandemic?
