This month we are hosting a new gallery showing featuring the work of Emma Macchiarini. A selection of her paintings will be on show until the end of January and available for public viewing Tuesday-Saturday from 11am-6pm.
Statement from the Artist:
Contrary to popular belief, it was not my grandfather, Peter Macchiarini, who taught me to draw. It was another artist, a woman named Virginia Macchiarini, who was married to Peter, and happened to be my grandmother, who schooled me in the nuances, and magic, of drawing. However, what I do remember clearly is that after I had created a drawing, my grandfather would come to examine them. He always told me to “fill the entire page” suggesting that perhaps I could learn something about composition as well as fidelity to the image.
Dimensions is about composition, design, macro and micro levels of visual imaging. It’s about jewelry, it’s about painting and drawing, and it’s about the deep sense of design and composition that runs through my bloodline.
It feels a little crazy to me to make a whole bunch of paintings of jewelry, since I have no idea if anyone will know how to value them as artwork. Who wants paintings of jewelry? But on some level I felt that the design components were interesting enough to transcend the basic sense of “what it is”. I also enjoyed calling into question what I was doing and to me it called up my love of Magritte’s questioning about whether a painting of a pipe is still a painting.
Another inspiration point for creating these paintings was my job at Academy of Art where I taught a Jewelry Rendering class. I learned so much in that experience, and I certainly upped the ante on my ability to paint and draw shiny stuff. At some point I felt like as an artist, there wasn’t enough freedom for me to depart from the rigors of academic drawing there. Simply making a drawing that looks exactly like a photo of an object has it’s uses, but in the end, it’s rather boring, isn’t it?
The bit of slap dash here and there, or some tiny exaggerations, or a rich velvety addition of texture was needed to keep me interested in drawing objects. There were other pedagogical disagreements with the Academy, but for the most part I felt like the experience grew me as an artist, which is of course tantamount to all other things in life, LOL.
For better or for worse, here is “Dimensions”, a show of paintings of jewelry. I chose images of the work of my father Dan, grandfather Peter and my own work to portray. These are all acrylic on canvas, and I made them in my home studio between work and raising a wild redheaded girl-child, doing chores and commuting.
So there you have it from the artists herself. What more is there to say?
This series of paintings are all paintings of jewelry and we loved the tones in which the jewelry is presented, the rich variance in all the reflection of the rendered metals and the love with which all the material was meticulously painted.