Today we’d like to introduce you to Olive Ayhens.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
In college at age eighteen, I made a commitment to be an artist. Obviously, it took hold, as here I am with a large body of connected work that has developed over all these years. Painting has been my life’s journey. As for those early days, my commitment represented burning my bridges, since my parents cut me off from support when I transferred from college to art school.
When I was in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute, conceptual and minimal artists were at war with the abstract expressionists. I was involved with inventing my own imagery. I loved paint handling like the abstract artists and shared their concern for scale, isolated color, push and pull space–in short a visual language. No way would I give up my imagery as they suggested. I received my M.F.A. in 1969.
In the early ’70s, I started working with watercolor. I came to this from oil and acrylic. Something in the handling of the watercolor added luminosity to my opaque work. The work was influenced by Biology, depicting patterns in nature, gardens, Pre Columbian sculpture, and love relationships. I joined a women artists’ group and we discussed topics and issues.
In 1972, my Mother died and through my sadness, I did poem paintings to her. I was hired to teach in Utah. The landscape there continues to haunt my work today. I returned to San Francisco to teach at California College of the Arts and have a one-person show in San Francisco, shows were frequent during this period.
In 1975, I married and moved to Eastern Washington. Our son Ezra was born that year. Birth themes were prevalent in my paintings. I want to include them someday in a retrospective. In 1977, another son Knute was born. My husband and I split up that year. I returned to San Francisco, a single parent. I always painted though out everything. I’ve taught at most of the colleges in the Bay Area, Berkeley, Stanford, San Francisco State, etc., etc. the University of Texas at Austin, Brown University, Montana State, Sarah Lawrence on & on. This pattern of teaching and collecting unemployment in-between and selling enough paintings I managed to get by. Taking teaching jobs throughout the country gave a feeling of displacement, but the varied environments influenced my work! My work continued to develop and I started to include images from the outside world in inventive ways in my paintings. A contemporary space of impossible juxtaposition and scale.
In 1996, I moved to NYC as a recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Space program. My sons were in college, so the timing was good. I’ve stayed in NYC ever since and it has been good for my career. I like the monumental scale of the place, museums but every year I need to get into extreme nature and I attend artists residencies. which are very supportive. Presently, I have a rent-subsidized studio in Dumbo. Grants (Guggenheim, Pollock-Krasner, Adolph & Esther Gottlieb, Joan Mitchell) and selling work have sustained me and given me the time I need to paint.
Please tell us about your art.
My painting evolves from a special sense of place, and transformation of environments in my own quirky ways. Sometimes, a political/ecological subtext, but always the love of the paint itself–with layering it, exploring & pushing color relationships, building textures, thin & thick, etc. I have fun with personification as well as improbabilities of scale. I am constantly renewed visually by everything around me, a feeling of the uniqueness of each environment in which I find myself. The very particular elements that arouse a passion within.
I work in a connected series of paintings. Past series reflected a year I spent in Montana, as well as aspects of California urban/tensions. My move to NYC inspired a series I refer to as “The Aesthetics of Pollution.”This theme deals with a confrontation of nature versus the urban assault, gridlock in streams and skyscrapers instead of cliffs on the sides, streams, and creeks returning to displace streets, with extinct and endangered animals. with bison up against skyscrapers, etc., etc. I was a recipient of the World Views residency, a studio in the former world trade center. The paintings while in residence reflected the fabric patterns of architecture and gridlock. My paintings following this residency were involved with superimposing volcanic activity in the Hudson. After 911, I put those paintings aside and focused on the luminosity of night light, movement of bridges and this evolved to include interior objects: malls, rafters, crowd scenes, soldiers, changing reflections on & on. My next passionate inspiration was the theme of “Extreme Interiors.” I visited a computer lab and was excited by the complexity of overlapping wires, equipment, robots. I felt this is like my cityscapes a total living system.
Shortly after the lab inspiration, I attended an artist residency in Spain. From this experience, I was influenced by the masterpieces of Moorish architecture as well as Gaudi’s innovative work. These interior themes can be very broad. The boundaries between inside and outside spaces become blurred with images intruding into and overlapping one another. I am continuing with paintings of landscapes in interiors and landscape as architecture. I continue to include animals within the structures. “Memories of Beasts Past” series. I was invited to do pieces celebrating the 100th year anniversary of Grand Central Station. This suited my passion for the place. My work is grounded in abstraction and I continue to push this further in a contemporary landscape sense with impossible spacial exaggerations. It’s exciting where this is taking my work.
We often hear from artists that being an artist can be lonely. Any advice for those looking to connect with other artists?
Get out and visit galleries, art spaces, museums, go to openings. Contact artists who do work you like. Artist can be open and generous to communicate about their work. I meet artists in other fields at residencies, composures, filmmakers, writers, dancers, performance artist, new media. We keep in touch.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I have a New York City gallery, Bookstein Projects, you may contact the gallery.
I also have work in a gallery in Miami, FL, Mindi Solomon gallery, you may contact that gallery.
You may visit my studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY.
Contact Info:
- Address: 85 Devoe St. #2C
- Website: www.oliveayhens.com
- Phone: 718-809-7842
- Email: ayhens@gmail.com
- Instagram: olive_addesktopd_photoayhens
- Facebook: m.facebook.com
- Twitter: OliveOyl.com
Image Credit:
credit is mine the artist, Olive Ayhens, titles of paintings, Oceans Rising, Hyper Urban & detail, Polluted Swamp, Roswell By Night, Remembering My Chickens, Computer Lab, West Side Highway. oil on canvas and ink and watercolor
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