 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
  Magician 2 by Erin Cone |
Atypical painter Erin Cone Atypical painter Erin Cone: portrait of the artist as a commercial success By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin Erin Cone doesn't give the same impression in person as she does in her self-portraits. The somewhat petite Cone is friendly and cheerful, if a little shy when she sits down for a chat on a sunny afternoon at Wally Workman Gallery. However, in the paintings that line the gallery walls, Cone's face and figure glower in harsh light. She looks stern, wary, apprehensive, aloof. "I just think that my neutral facial expression just looks pissed off," she says with a laugh. Waiters approach her gingerly assuming she's angry. Strangers in the grocery store tell her she looks pensive. But really, Cone is a rather happy person these days. Even if she is exhausted right now, having driven in the night before from her home in Santa Fe, N.M., to open her fifth annual solo exhibit in Austin. Perhaps she's happy because commercial success has found her, even if critical acclaim hasn't quite caught up with her work. (Cone has been celebrated, however, in these pages for years.) "My career is pretty atypical," she says. Indeed. Most art school graduates toil away at day jobs, creating art on the side and trying to break into juried group exhibits, hoping those just might lead to gallery representation and regular solo shows. Cone took another course. The Amarillo native landed in Austin halfway through her undergraduate career when her husband, Will (her high-school sweetheart), started graduate school. She completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Texas, and afterward went to work as an illustrator for a book publisher. But she found making commercial illustrations to be a soul-crushing experience, and after a couple of years, she quit. Two weeks after quitting, after virtually no research into Austin galleries, she approached longtime dealer Wally Workman, who signed Cone on immediately and scheduled her first solo exhibit. Five years later, Cone is in a position where few 29-year-old artists find themselves. Her paintings fetch between $2,000 and $10,000. Her solo exhibits regularly sell out, and she and her husband were able to follow their bliss three years ago to Santa Fe, where she paints full time. She has seven people on a waiting list who have commissioned her to paint their portraits. But though she's gotten a few good reviews, Cone has never seen her work in a museum, nor had a curator select it for a juried show. But that hasn't stopped people from clamoring after her paintings. Perhaps that's because -- though she mostly paints self-portraits or portraits of people close to her, such as her husband -- the figures remain tantalizingly unspecific. In fact, Cone doesn't really think of her self-portraits as, well, pictures of herself. "Of course, the figures themselves are very stylized," she says. "And in that sense they aren't specifically realistic. But I'm really only using myself because it's easier for me to pose the way I want than it is if I try to use someone else." Indeed, her creative process is a pretty private affair. After finding her poses and crafting the harsh lighting, Cone has her husband snap photographs from which she culls. She then combines the stylized poses with the abstract, almost harshly minimal, backgrounds or flat color blocks and lines. In the end, the individuality of her figures becomes even more vague. Cone wants it that way. Above all else, she is fascinated by the human form and the different ways it can express emotional states -- she'd just rather not reveal all the particulars. "I want to show all of the emotion of a certain moment, but none of the context," she says. "I'd rather people find their own stories in my paintings." That's certainly the case for arts patron Bettye Nowlin, who is board president of the Austin Museum of Art. She owns a painting by Cone that features a male figure whose face is buried in his crossed arms. "There is nothing to give you a clue about what's behind the painting, so you are free to make it up yourself," Nowlin says. "On days that I'm tired, so is he. On days that I'm distraught, so is he." And that's exactly the response Cone intends: that her paintings are endless yet enigmatic mirrors of the human condition. 'Erin Cone: Fifth Annual Show' |
|
|
|
||
 Grease by Soody Sharifi |
Iran -- her motherland, his first trip -- supplied setting for mother-son exhibit By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin Soody and Payam Sharifi tell different stories about the same place. The mother-and-son pair of artists -- whose first collaboration is now at Women & Their Work -- both went to Iran last year. For Soody Sharifi, it wasn't the first time she returned to the country of her birth since she emigrated to the United States in 1974 at age 19. The Houston-based artist had been back several times. While there, she has worked on two different photographic series. One explores the role of women under Islam. The other mines her identity as an Iranian American woman who chose not to return to her homeland after the 1979 Iranian Revolution when the Shah was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power. But it was the first time her Austin-born son, Payam Sharifi, had ever been. "Basically, I had quite a schizophrenic approach to the country," writes Payam Sharifi in an e-mail from London, where he now lives. "I was at once very much an insider (it was the first time in my life everyone looked like me) and an outsider. It was no more 'my' country than is France where I lived for 5 years, or the UK where I live presently." Despite their different reactions, mother and son realized that they were essentially dealing with the same question: "How to represent a country in a manner which is as sophisticated and complex as Iran is? Where do we stand on the shifty question of the revolution?" Payam Sharifi says. For Soody Sharifi, that has meant training her lens on the more intimate moments of everyday life in Iran for her "Muslim Teenagers" series. She created large-format color images of young Iranian girls doing things pretty much most girls around the world do -- fixing each other's hair, ogling movie stars, sneaking cigarettes -- yet they do it in the context of their conservative Islamic country. "Teenagers as a group are constantly aware of themselves," she has written about the series. "Especially as individuals caught between cultures. In Iran in particular, these teens exist in and partake of the larger adult culture that surrounds them while participating in another culture exclusive to teens." Soody Sharifi also created what she calls the "Maxiature" series -- collages of enlarged Persian miniature paintings, onto which she has digitally placed contemporary photographic figures. Payam Sharifi used his mother's two series as his point of departure. Essentially, he acted as something of an anthropologist, collecting visual materials (from publications or from posters) and taking photographs during his Iranian sojourn. But his approach was different from his mother's. "Her work is very elegant and delicate," he says. "Mine is pretty obvious and not very subtle." At Women & Their Work, mother and son mixed their different images together on the gallery walls. The result is that Payam Sharifi's straight-up photos of cartoonish sculpture -- goofy roosters, ducks, even a cluster of grapes that are the officially sponsored public sculpture in Iran -- are juxtaposed to his mother's dramatically subtle portraits of teens. And while Payam Sharifi lines a wall with large cut-out photos of propagandist murals -- heroic battle scenes from the revolution or idealized portraits of revolutionary martyrs -- his mother contributes a trio of her refined "Maxiature" images. "I think the Sharifis are addressing a number of important issues that range from the politicization of Iran, the clash of cultures between the U.S. and Iran and a changed post-terror global climate," says Kathleen Jameson, associate curator at the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, who wrote the essay for the Sharifis' current exhibit. "Their range of materials and the installation echo the diversity of ideas and multiplicity of cultural responses they have documented." Soody Sharifi has a more modest view of the work with her son. "I know we have not been able to cover everything," she says. "But by presenting aspects of everyday life, we hope the viewer can see more of a three-dimensional life in Iran." Proud and Sad/Wrong and Strong |
|