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Biography:
Betsy
Podlach recieved her BA in English literature
and fiction writing at Harvard University,
where she was a Watson Scholar. While
studying painting at the New York Studio
School and the International School
of Art in Umbria, Italy, she received
awards from the Charles H. Revson Foundation
and the Seligman von Simson Foundation
as well as several private grants and
commissions. She received her MFA in
Sculpture 2000 from New York Academy
of Art, New York.
Her paintings are about relationships.
They are created through a personal,
abstract conception of form, space and
light. She says, "I work from direct
observation - the beauty of objects
in light, the anatomy or the landscape
- along with my unconscious. In doing
so, I try to combine three-dimensional
form and depth with the flat picture
plane into a uniquely painted space.
I work with color to create a light
coming from within the picture, stillness
that reverberates. I use nature, these
formal principles, and my imagination
to form a personal image."
Podlach,
who lives and works in New York City,
is currently represented by galleries
in New York, Key West, and Art Cabinet
Nantucket on Nantucket Island. Her work
is in private collections in New York
City and Italy, including the collection
of Princess Donatella Borghese in Rome,
and the corporate collection of Pfizer,
Inc., in New York.
New York-based artist Betsy Podlach
has been painting landscape, still-life,
and figural works for nearly a decade.
Her ostensibly sober and effortless
compositions are brightly illuminated
stages upon which the most discreet
Chekovian dramas may potentially unfold.
Formally speaking,
Podlach's palette of frosty blues, reds
and oranges laid on back-lit canvases
render her subjects icons of our time.
As her flowers and women appear enraptured
by halos of light and mystery, myriad
shades of sun- drenched whites create
milieus worthy of idolized portrayals
of femininity, as well as the most tender
or exotic bouquets.
In her still-lives,
multiple layers of thickly clustered
bright colors suggest arrangements of
flowers that are set in front of, at
sometime, thickly tinted and, others,
luminescent white screen. At times,
barely decipherable lines and, at others,
boldly geometric shapes define the spaces
of Podlach's pictures. In either case,
constellations of intertwined flora
in the middle of the painting are veiled
behind luminous curtains of pallor.
Ultimately, however, it is her evocative
[self-] portraits for which Podlach
is most
celebrated, among fans and collectors
alike. At once brash and bashful, she
creates her implicitly erotic figures
following the long-standing tradition
which begins with Classical Greek and
Roman mythology. The erotic - derived
from eros, the Greek word for physical
love for another person (in contrast
to agape the spiritual love for a god)
- has permeated Western & Eastern
art's visual life for millennia. According
to this tradition's iconography, love,
sex, religion, and magic are inspirations
for and symbolic promotion of: human
fertility; spiritual powers; and defense
against malevolent forces, to name but
a few motives.
Not unlike Renaissance
images, Podlach's women stand somewhere
between Greek mythological deities and
Biblical heroines. (In these two contesting
traditions, [Birth of] Venus and Leda
[and the Swan] vie with Susanna [and
the Elders] and Judith [and Holofernes]
.as well as representations of the most
unlikely heroine, Mary Magdalene.)
On the one hand,
her figure's ashen nakedness relates
them to Greco-Roman goddesses. On the
other hand, their fine and slender bodies
convey an undeniable sense of youthful
innocence which defies ancient (fertility)
divinities' voluptuousness. Podlach's
women embody the kind of abstemious
fragility - resulting either from gentle
prudence or steadfast devotion - that
endows them with seductive powers of
angelic [celestial] type.
Still, the figures'
air of asceticism and reticence contradicts
their frank and bold gaze at the viewer.
In these auto-portraits, the artist's
haunting presence brims with wistful
longings of a woman who is aware of
her own desiring body, and desirability.
Podlach's deceptively impenetrable looks
draw the viewer into private arenas
where sacro et profano longings may
encounter, and gratify one another.
By allowing dichotomies
of boldness and tenderness to co-exist,
Betsy Podlach's oeuvre challenges erotic
forms and expressive spheres of (still-)
life which, until very recently, have
been the domain of male artists.
Homa T. Nasab
St. Catherine's College
University of Oxford
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