Women Who Changed the World, Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Ginsburg became the second woman to join the Supreme Court when President Bill Clinton nominated her in 1993. She had served for thirteen years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Prior to her career as a judge, she was a law professor and, as her colleague Antonin Scalia described her in Time Magazine’s 2015 “The 100 Most Influential People,” she was a “leading (and very successful) litigator on behalf of women’s rights—the Thurgood Marshall of that cause.” With the departure of John Paul Stevens in 2010, Ginsburg now enjoys the most senior position on the liberal wing of the Court.

Done, except for the earrings.

Under painting - encaustic

laying out the face

process

Women Who Changed The World, Benizar Bhutto

 From the encaustic abstract to the finished portrait. To see the whole process check out my Face Book page https://www.facebook.com/Ezshwans-paintings-132813546782502/timeline/

Marian Anderson, A Woman Who Changed the World

I finished the painting of Marian Anderson today ( I think) Below is the process of this painting.

Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. The incident placed Anderson into the spotlight of the international community on a level unusual for a classical musician. With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. She sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions. Anderson continued to break barriers for black artists in the United States, becoming the first black person, American or otherwise, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 7, 1955. Her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage.

Back to Encasutic

After months of painting in oil, I set up my encaustic palette. It is very different than my regular encaustic palette, since I mix and blend colors right on the hot surface. I lay it out with the same colors as the palette I use in oil.

cooled down and wax hardened

The painting that I was not satisfied with.

Same panting, after a days re-work

Back to encaustic abstracts

I am getting ready for a gallery show in January and although I have lots of new figurative paintings to show, I wanted to make a few new abstracts. I have piles of older paintings that I am not satisfied with and started painting over a few. Here are the results:

This was the under painting

after a few days work it turned into this

Similar feel, but smaller and no shot of the under painting

I had started to scrape off all the encasutic paint and I discovered that the board had a beautiful stain. I left the side painting and worked on the middle part for a couple of days, filling in the lower scraped part with clear encaustic and working on top of that.

Cambridge University Press bought this image

I just sent another invoice for the right to use this image of an encaustic painting to Cambridge University Press in Spain. Previously, the original press in London bought the rights to print, for this same painting.

Nice to still have the painting to sell. Check it out on my website: www.ezshwan.com, under Time of Witness.

El Mercado

Jackie Icon, oil and encaustic

Here is the second one is the series of "Modern Icons".

I made these double triptychs in the year 2000 using oil and encaustic. I painted the figures in oil. (This was before I figured out how to paint figures in encaustic.) I then carved through the encaustic to reveal the colors or gold leaf underneath.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis was another women the country turned into an icon. Gold upon gold surrounds the image of Jackie O. My research into her life portrayed her as a woman to whom money was of utmost importance. Her poise and regal manner echoed her education, style, and breeding. Jacqueline spoke several languages and understood the importance of the arts. She was one of the first persons in the white house who wished to bring the visual, musical and performing art into the presidential home and to the American people.

On the right panel, we see Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of beauty and and good fortune blessing Jackie with great abundance and lasting beauty. The left panel is the goddess Kali, the representative of death and rebirth who signifies the dark contrasts that plagued Jackie's life.

After the serene and balanced front of the icon, our senses are shaken with the bloody and rather dreadful back. Here I have collaged images of Jackie's life starting with her as a pampered child; the inauguration of John Kennedy, Jackie's in widow's mourning, all the Kennedy family, her children and finally Onasis. I covered the collaged images with red and pink encaustic giving the impression of blood.

detail of icon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A special sale

Yesterday, I held my open studio, once a year sale, and a dear friend bought a piece that I thought I would never sell, because of all the work that went into the series, "Modern Icons" .

I will be posting more of them as the days go by.

Each one took many weeks of study, investigation and art making. After collecting all the information on each icon, I cut the separate panels out of solid birch. I then painted the figures in oil with encaustic over many of the areas. Using a sharpened chop stick, I made intricate carvings into the encaustic to reveal the underneath colors and create pattern. The backs of all of these icon continue the message.

Aunt Jemima was the star of this sold icon. Here is her story;

Most Americans are familiar with Aunt Jemima. She has been called "The Slave in a box"; a painful America icon that represents the most demeaning and racist chapters in American history.

"Whites gave us this image", explains Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, whose book on how blacks were portrayed in advertising, takes a critical view of Aunt Jemima; "They made her very dark, very obese, and they put her in the kitchen"

One if the great myths of slavery was that black women were either Jezebel or Mammy, or both. There were both a harlot and the mothering old Aunt Jemima. Of course these women were not authentic. They were stereotypes. They were myths created by these "poor" white slave owners that used their sexual cravings for these black "harlots" to justify their lustful behavior. The white fathers claimed no fault when mixed race children were born to these "Jezebels". 

The women who portrayed Aunt Jemima were part of a tradition that dated to 1893, when  former slave named Nancy Green greeted visitors to the World's Fair in Chicago. Green cooked, sang songs and told tales of the Old South, while reportedly serving more than a million pancakes and helping generate more than 50,000 orders for the pancake mix. That was followed by tours across the United Sates and Canada until her death in 1923.

The character's legend holds that Aunt Jemima had been a slave on a fictional Col. Higbee's plantation. A typical magazine ad from the turn of the century shows a heavy set black cook talking happily while a white man takes notes.

In a broader sense, says Kern-Foxworth, this type of depiction had been stifling to blacks for many years, because it was about the only image of a black woman that was ever seen in the mainstream media. The message it reinforces, says Kern-Foxworth, is that" black women belong in the kitchen, or in their master's bed".

On the sides of this triptych, we see Aunt Jemima's angels; Rosa Parks, the woman who changed a nations' history by sitting down for what she believed in and refusing to give up her bus seat. On the other side is a Masai bride; proud, beautiful and strong.

On the main panel of the back of this icon features the Black Madonna. It is known that the iconography if Isis (who is often portrayed as black) and her son Horus was basically adopted by Christians when they started to portray Mary and Jesus as mother and child.

Among the important black women also pictured on the back of the icon is Josephine Baker in La Revve Negre. She received the Legion of Honor in France for her work in the resistance.

Ida Weel-Barnett, 1862 - 1931, was a relentless campaigner against  racial lynching. She was a predecessor of Rosa Parks in 1884, when she refused to give up her train seat. She became a journalist in 1891.

We also see Althea Gibson, tennis star, born in 1927 and Bessie Smith, singer, 1895 - 1937.

I have included a few of today's powerful black women: Marian Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund; an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional career, Whoppi Goldberg, Ophra Windfrey and Maya Angelu, none of whom could be confused with an Aunt Jemima.

Across the top of the back panel I carved a quote from the Song of Solomon.  "I am Black and I am Beautiful"