Dragana Crnjak

These images are from an installation by Dragana Crnjak in a show at the main Herron art gallery @ IUPUI in Indianapolis, IN. These images are done in acrylic and charcoal. The marks in charcoal seem to have shadows underneath as the charcoal dust fall, which gives them an implied dimension while the others marks are flat. There is an interesting play of space involved. Before I had more clues as to what the image was about (migration, for one thing), I had a sense of the natural or wild being expressed.

As seen in the detail, some of the marks are of animals such as wolves - though even they blend in with the overall abstractness. She also mentioned ideas relating to villiage and community. And there is definitely wildness going on.

I went to her lecture on Wednesday. She is from Bosnia and her family came to the USA with refugee status. Some of her works, like the ones below, are more about houses (sometimes upside down), displacement and negative space.

I Flipped (2007)


Unusual Morning (2007)

More can be seen at her website: http://www.draganacrnjak.com/

Glue, Ceramics and Cloth

I went to the January show at the Halcyon in Terre Haute the other day. Upon walking into the foyer area, one encounters Christy Brinkman's hot glue creations. The dark grey-blue wall shows them off most effectively. The light, whitish translucent quality suggests snowflakes, but the shapes seem more like mold, or coral, or some life form yet unseen.

I have seen Ms. Brinkman working on these. It's a labor intensive process as she builds up the structures with strips of hot glue. It is interesting to experience the result, many of these glue creatures together in an environment. The dark back room with strategic lighting suggests an underwater habitat. Even though, they are so much plastic, unlike other plastic things, Brinkman's creations seem more fragile - as life is.



_________________In the large gallery is ceramics created by Judy Ohmit and textiles/quilts by Julia Sermersheim.

Sermersheim's quilt/textile pieces are mostly about abstraction and color - as quilts typically have been. Sermersheim's quilts often express a more organic nature - and a playful use of stitching. The one with the pond is the most literal in it's expression. The one shown in the background of the two ceramic figures is the most colorful. (You have to experience this in person to get the full effect - nothing could adequately reproduce those colors).
________________________
I like the way Judy Ohmit's ceramic women relate to each other - especially "Sisters" - and I like the colors and simplicity of them. In one sense some of them are like so many gift items that portray occupations. Perhaps one thing that makes these different is that so many of those things are about more typical types, while many of these are less typical yet abstract - such as "Hope."________________________________
Berthe_Morisot________________________

Sisters________________________

Soon, I'll go off to work on a painting that is a multi-week process. The colors of the quilts inspire me to push the colors in my painting; the ceramic figures to endow my figures with personality. While I always like to express the organic quality of life - the hot glue pieces remind me to be experimental in my approach.

Sylvia Sleigh

Working At Home (1969)

From the New York Times:

Sylvia Sleigh, the British-born artist who put a feminist spin on portrait painting, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

"Ms. Sleigh, who came to prominence as part of the surging feminist art movement of the 1970s, turned traditional portraiture on its head by presenting the male nude posed as a reclining Venus or odalisque, although she also painted both sexes, clothed and unclothed," writes William Grimes.

She was born in Wales in 1916, studied at the Brighton School of Art, lived in London for about 20 years and moved to the US in 1961.

Through her work with the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists and Women in the Arts, as well as her exhibitions with the SoHo 20 Gallery and A.I.R., she emerged in the 1970s as a prominent artist with an audacious take on traditional art history.

Not only were the sex roles reversed, but her paintings also wittily cast her all-too-human subjects in situations reserved for the gods of antiquity in Renaissance art.

Turkish Bath (1973)

Rosano Reclining (1974)

Annunciation (1975)

It was interesting to see the paintings posted with the NYT article - and the gardens that she included as part of her paintings - such as in "Annunciation". I don't remember seeing those before. A nice mix of flowers/gardens and people. I've just started adding people into my own paintings. I'm much more comfortable painting nature - having done so for years - but I enjoy the challenge of painting people, and it certainly changes the environment. People can overpower the painting, because of the way we, as people notice the people more. But it is evident in her paintings that she was very interested in the gardens. It's also interesting to see the figures in the modern dress of the day - the cut-offs.

A.I.R. 1978

This would be a good painting to show with the Zoffany piece - when doing art history. The A.I.R. group portrait (AIR = Artist In Residence).

I noticed her best work was done in her 50s :)

Susan Sze

I was surfing along and came across this at the Villiage Voice:

Sarah Sze's Return of the Real
The sculptor conjures a low-budget cosmos.
By Christian Viveros-Fauné

Stuck between a recession and a recovery, the art world is predictably game for eating and hoarding cake, too. A perfect example of the current cupidity is Dan Colen's windily hyped exhibition at Larry Gagosian's big tent......Other gross-out manifestations of the art world's gluttony include, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the return of "the collector-cum-investor" (again?) and the upcoming October rehanging of Jeff Koons's 1990 porn paintings (not again!). Second servings of gut-busting excess, developments like these compare to excellent art as Marie Antoinette's high spirits do to Bishop Desmond Tutu's compassion. Expressions of sheer vulgarity, they conversely magnify the work of artists whose generosity exposes the lie that contemporary art is a members-only club for rich, superficial, faddish assholes.

The present antidote to piggish tidings is Sarah Sze's blooming, bounteous installations of stuff we regularly overlook, which she effortlessly transforms into far-out Lilliputs and down-to-earth Space Odysseys. A modest character—despite being a MacArthur Fellow—Sze has long pointed the way to Whitmanesque freethinking through her interpretations of democratic consumerism. Cast from the bins at Target, Walgreens, and Home Depot, her sculptures convey both the epic and mundane integrity of Leaves of Grass.

Sze came seemingly out of nowhere in the late 1990s as a full-blown original artist. Since then, she has been marshalling disposable objects such as matchsticks, water bottles, and office supplies to make three-dimensional paintings that double as sculpture, and sculptures that look like all-over Jackson Pollock paintings. Using shop-bought debris to confect experiences of visual overload, she has essentially made a metaphor of life's disorders...

Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
212-414-4144, tanyabonakdargallery.com
Through October 23

I like Sze's work best when she incorporates space into them. Those are the ones that have more of the Jackson Pollock sense about them. Some of her pieces have more of a sense of a messy desk. The ones that I like are the ones where it seems that gravity is defied and there is all of this stuff of life floating around, yet interconnected.




_______________________Her 360 (Portable Planetarium) does this.



I prefer the practice of going to recycling places or Goodwills, Restores etc., to get all of the "stuff of life" to assemble - rather than buying up a bunch of new crap from Targets and Walgreens. Some things may be too difficult to find used - but it adds nothing of value to the pieces for them to be part of the cycle of buying a bunch of unnecessary Stuff.

HermesFrontpage

While I enjoy Tara Donovan's work - often installations, as well - one thing I like about Sze is the huge variety of things that she uses in each piece. It's interesting the way in which Donovan will use just plastic cups, or sheets of paper piled up to suggest a landscape. But in a way, Sze's work seems more natural, even though she also uses man-made stuff, because of the variety of textures and materials.

And while one can enjoy seeing the photos of the works, these are works to be experienced. Walking around and considering how they look from many angles and distances, etc. is part of the fun. With the ease of images that we can get on the internet and other media, art such as this keeps galleries and museums relevant.

Séraphine

Last evening I watched the movie, Séraphine. The movie is about Séraphine Louis, known as "Séraphine de Senlis"(1864–1942), a French artist who was mostly supporting herself by cleaning, and who was also passionate about painting. She felt she had a divine inspiration. She was self-taught and painted in "modern primitive" style.

In the movie, Wilhelm Unde moves into a house that Séraphine had been cleaning - through an arrangement with the landlady. The landlady scorns Séraphine's paintings, but Unde loves them and buys many of them. He also gives Séraphine money, and at various points in the movie is shown to be supporting her so that she can paint instead of clean.
L'arbre De Vie (The Tree of Life)_________________

In the movie - the situation is presented such that Unde appreciated her, but was not able to get her a show because of the economy - and so the community never did know of her or appreciate her. It was all him. In the movie, all the money she got (besides cleaning) seemed to come from him.

It sounds like the real story is that he did discover her, was able to find venues for her work, and get her into shows, and that she developed a degree of prominence and financial success with her art through the shows.

The rewriting of the story to make Unde her sole benefactor and supporter does Séraphine (and I think all women) a disservice. It reminds me of the Aristotle prescription for theatre where women are not to shown as being clever or brave or independent. It doesn't fit the narrative that men such as Aristotle wanted to have for women in society. So Séraphine is shown as being totally dependent on Unde and then becomes mentally ill, is hospitalized and he is the only one to look after her (besides the hospital staff) then as well.

Unfortunately, this is not all that unusual. The movie about Camille Claudel was similar in that Camille was fine as long as Rodin was around, but then fell apart, went insane and died. Camille Claudel was more successful in real life than the movie indicated.

I blame it on Aristotle and everyone who blindly follows his ideas (whether they know they are doing that or not - the status quo). It would be a step in the right direction, and a boost for women's equality, if movies about women (esp. biographies) would show the women as being as successful as they were/are.

---
Seraphine's paintings may be found at the Musée Maillol in Paris, the Musée d'art de Senlis, the Musée d'art naïf in Nice, and the Musée d'Art moderne Lille Métropole in Villeneuve-d'Ascq. Last year there had been an exhibition "Séraphine Louis dite Séraphine de Senlis" at the Musée Maillol in Paris.

Arahmaiani

Arahmaiani's Artist Statement:

To be a feminist means one must face formidable challenges from the conservatives and the fundamentalists. Conflict happens because the religious conservatives and fundamentalists don’t want to loose the legitimacy of their power! And the second challenge is the impact of globalization, where the woman and her body tend to be exploited. Her body may be bought and sold in the cheap labour market. The authorities and the global economic decisions makers often stand on the side of the conservatives and the fundamentalists in their attitude towards those groups who are weak.

Arahmaiani is from Bandung, Indonesia (b.1961). Her work has been exhibited internationally such as at the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, in 1996; the Bienal de La Habana, Havana, Cuba, in 1997; the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France, and Werkleitz Biennale, Germany, in 2000; the Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea, in 2002; and the Venice Biennale in 2003 and at the Global Feminisms exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. She does performance art, painting, drawing, installation, poetry, dance, and music.

From Nafas Art Magazine:

Arahmaiani is a key figure in the current art scene in Indonesia....Her father is an Islamic scholar and her mother is of Javanese Hindu-Buddhist extraction. Already their daughter’s name was a compromise. She readily explains that "Arahma" goes back to the Arabic language meaning „loving“, and „iani“ comes from „human being“ in Hindi. Her upbringing saw the coexistence of both convictions: whereas her father provided a strict Islamic culture and instruction, her mother’s family enabled her to learn Javanese dances, songs, legends, poetry, and custom....Arahmaiani considers that her natural inclination to play the role of a mediator between the worlds is anchored in her origins....

In addition, it is part of Arahmaiani’s ethos as a female artist to use her public presence in order to attract attention to violence against women in general and to female discrimination in Indonesia’s Islamic society in particular. A fundamental aspect of her criticism of the prevailing interpretation of Islam is that men derive their claim to sole authority in decision taking from it. She acts against religion as a rigid set of rules and defends her right to her own interpretation as an individual and as a woman....

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, Arahmaiani felt prompted to combine/complement her critical attitude towards Islam with a fight against its general stigmatization. When she is intent on trying to make people mostly of the Western world understand that the majority of Muslims are just as peace-loving as themselves, she does not consider that she is defending this religion, but simply pure common sense.

Some of her paintings have been of Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck in commentary about the USA and some it's actions (she was confined in LA while trying to travel to Canada in 2002 - what with being from a Muslim country). She also has done performances where she invites people to write on her. Her more recent landscapes are painterly gray landscapes with words. From a description of a 2005 exhibition at Valentine Willie Fine Art, Bangsar, KL:

The paintings will be supported with photographs of Iani’s body/text works, by Bernice Chauly, and an interactive performance at the opening. The link to the three components of the exhibition is text. In the paintings, Arahmaiani has laid words across the landscapes, discussing cultural and social issues and adding that provocative element which is her benchmark. The issue sitting beneath the work is exploitation of the art market.

Video of Arahmaiani at the Global Feminisms at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007.

Gillian Ayres and Therese Oulton

____________Gillian Ayres



______________________Therese Oulton

Gillian Ayres and Therese Oulton are British painters who paint rather expressively. Gillian Ayres was born in 1930 - her paintings reflect more the influence of Abstract Expressionism - she started out being inspired by Jackson Pollock. Therese Oulton was born in 1953 and her work is more neo-expressionist along the lines of Anselm Kiefer- in that more depth in shown, and the newer paintings also incorporate landscape in an expressionistic manner. Both artists use thick paint and textures.

Gillian Ayres - Tachiste Painting No.1 1957

Gillian Ayres - Antony and Cleopatra 1982

From the Tate online:

'Anthony and Cleopatra' was painted in the artist's studio at Llaniestyn, North Wales in the winter of 1981-2. It contrasts with the densely worked surfaces of her paintings during the 1970s. Ayres has explained that she wanted to achieve a sense of the sublime through the scale of markings. It also differs from other paintings of the early 1980s in having a yellow ochre ground rather than a white ground. The reason for this was that she was snowed in for several days and was unable to purchase any white lead. As usual, the title was given after the painting was completed. Ayres's titles do not describe the subject of the paintings. Rather the titles have a 'resonance' which relates to the character of each work.
(From the display caption September 2004)

A roomful of Ayre's at the British School at Rome

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Therese Oulton - DISSONANCE QUARTET NO. 3 1986

From the Tate Online Oulton is quoted:

a series of oil paintings called ‘Dissonance Quartet’ which I showed in Vienna while I was living in Vienna. The reference was to Mozart's ‘Dissonance Quartet’. It was the idea that the ‘Dissonance Quartet’ does not end on a tonic resolution; and it was the idea of taking something of wholeness, like harmony or the circle, and then emptying that of its usual connotations. At the time, my particular concern was to take given meanings and see if they were still workable, or whether the weight of meaning was too great to use any more...

In the series things were turned inside out, and body metaphors, I think, began to creep in ... I began to like where the armour-plating became the flesh, so it was kind of turned inside out. There was often a kind of ribbing that could have been something protective. And the surface is bowed out like a Counter-Reformation Mannerist type of painting.

Therese Oulton - Untitled No.3 2007

Some of Therese Oulton's paintings merely suggest nature, but many of her later works (as can be seen at the Marlborough Gallery site) look like views from airplanes. Many with cites and roads suggested, some with shorelines. The landscapes look rather cut-up- in that there is the sense that human buildings have altered the landscapes. Some of her newer ones are oil on aluminum - most are oil on canvas.

Ana Mendieta

Prior to the 60s, women were advised to divorce art from female experience and self-awareness. During the 60s, various artists were breaking out from these restraints. Marisol, Eva Hesse, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar. Other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel and Frida Kahlo finally started getting the attention they long deserved.

Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba 1948–1985) came on the scene with her performance - earth/body images in 1972 - having studied intermedia at the University of Iowa. Some artists had been making monumental earth works and others had been making performance pieces with their bodies - and Mendieta made an interesting link with her earth-body pieces. Some of her pieces refer to prehistoric goddess imagery, many are about re-connecting humans and nature.

Grass On Woman - 1972 - Lifetime color photograph___________

In 1973, Judy Chicago (who will be speaking in Evansville next Monday) and Miriam Shapiro asked the question, 'What does it feel like to be a woman?" The art world had been so focused on the male point of view, that it was something to think about for women. Some women thought (still think?) that any male/female differences are a matter of socialization and are not real. But even then, there are different sensory issues, the ability to give birth, etc.

Imagen de Yagul -1973 - Lifetime color photograph___________

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette)… I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth… I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body…” - Ana Mendieta

Silueta Works in Mexico - 1973-78 -C-Print

"One beach sculpture consists of red bouganvillea blossoms in the shape of the artist’s body with arms raised. The incoming waves have washed away the lower part of the figure. For those familiar with Santeria, the symbolism is clear: Chango, a principal orisha, always is represented by the color red. His mistress is Yemayá, orisha of the ocean, whose frothy waves represent her lacy petticoats. Mendieta’s art shows Yemayá’s petticoats covering the legs of Chango, whose arms are raised in surprise or delight. Like the ocean, Yemayá represents both a loving and wrathful mother; they say you can take shelter from your enemies under her skirts, but if you provoke her anger, there is nowhere you can hide." (Virginia Miller Gallery)

_________________________________

Mendieta was among the first to reconnect with ancient concepts such as the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life goes back to some of the earliest of civilizations in and around the Middle East and Indus Valley. Some have speculated that the Tree of Life and Mother Goddess concepts traveled from India through or around Europe to Scandinavia and Ireland and even to the Americas. There are similarities in art, ideas, and rituals that connect Old India with Old Celtic / Viking and Aztec. The Tree of Life was a symbol that connected life and death, earth and sky.

Tree of Life - 1976 - Lifetime color photograph

Hirshorn Show
Virginia Miller Gallery Show

Mercedes Matter

Mercedes Matter - 1934
Mercedes Matter (1913-2001) was one of the founding members (at age 23 as Jeanne Carles) of American Abstract Artists in 1936. Other founding members included: Josef Albers and David Smith. Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson joined later, as did many other well-known abstract artists.

She got work with the WPA, dated Arshile Gorky (when he was still a non-citizen and couldn't work for the WPA), studied with Alexander Archipenko & Hans Hoffman, and met Lee Krasner in jail. Mercedes and Lee were arrested for participating in a strike in 1935. Matter worked with Fernand Leger on murals.
1940________________________

1943-45 she spent in California, married to Herbert Matter and had a baby. She returned to NYC in 1946.

"Then it was the Cedar Bar and The Club itself. All kinds of nonsense went on about membership, about how to pick members, whether women should be admitted. There was quite a fuss about making Mercedes Matter the first female member of The Club and things like that"

-Leo Castelli

Matter wrote:

"The Artists’ Club was formed in which I was the one female original member in a very male dominated situation. However, the Club became a most unique and wonderful thing including artists of the widest divergence from Edwin Dickinson to Phillip Guston, Bradley Tomlin to Joan Mitchell, with the composers and writers as much a part. The Cedar Bar during those years was perhaps the best part of my education. As de Kooning said, “Art is something you can’t talk about and you talk about forever.”

"Influenced by the artistic precepts of Hofmann, Matter was a proponent of painting directly from nature. Her works are characterized by vigorous angular marks and geometricized rhythms. Many of her pieces represent a unique fusion of advanced gestural abstraction and a sensitive perceptual observation of landscape and still-life motifs." - Figge

The paintings that she created in the 30s are compared to Gorky's (of course he could have just as easily been influenced by her). Matter's painting above from 1940 suggests DeKooning's "Woman I" done in 1950. Mercedes Matter certainly seems to have been an influential figure in the Abstract Art genre - and yet I had never heard of her. The artcyclopedia.com/ does not include her on their site, and she is absent from many accounts of art of the times.

She started teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art (now called the University of the Arts), Pratt and NYU. She was a visiting critic at Antioch, Brandeis, Cincinnati School of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Maryland Institute, Yale University, Skowhegan and American University in Washington.
1942

She was in groups shows:

American Abstract Artists, 1936-42

Stable Gallery, annual shows, 1950’s

Peridot Gallery, early 1950’s

Tanager Gallery, annual exhibitions, 1950’s and many others

In recent years her work has been seen in show such as "Pollock Matters" and "From Hartley to Hofmann
Provincetown Vignettes, 1899-1945"

She had her first one person show in 1956 at the Tanager Gallery.

It was apparently typical for women not to get one person show for years after their male peers had. (In an LA Weekly article, Doug Harvey suggests the reason for her late one-person show was her inability to commit to a solo show earlier.)

from 1962___________________

There is a retrospective of her work which is on it's last leg at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport Iowa - through January 2,2011.

Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Louise Bourgeious - Surrealism

I have toyed with surrealism some. I like the opportunity to express ideas and emotions that could not be similarly expressed in pure abstraction or pure realism.

From what I've read of the surrealist movement, however, it was dominated by misogynistic males. I saw a show in Copenhagen (2009) that was the most anti-female art that I have ever seen in a museum. It gave me the creeps.

It is interesting to learn in Frida Kahlo's biography that while she spent some time with the Surrealists in Paris- that she didn't care much for their theorizing. She was not interested in being considered a part of their group.

I am finishing the book, Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick (many images from the book can be found here). In the book, there is an image, supposedly by Leonor Fini called Sphinx Regina which I like (a close-up of nature with bones)- but it is so unlike anything else that I see that was done by her (mostly women with little background)- that I don't think it was by her. At the very least, it is not representative, from what I can tell.


___________________Leonor Fini
Red Vision___________________


___________________Leonor Fini Grande___________________


Fini's paintings tend toward the ghostly / spiritual.
______________________________________

___________________Leonora Carrington Labyrinth___________________

There is an University of Albany Museum site featuring several 20th century women (based on an exhibition) that has an image by Leonora Carrington (born England 1917, lives in Mexico) - Big Badger Meets the Domino Boys. Fortunately I looked up some others by her - because that one did not seem representative, either. But it did not seem so completely differnt and it may just be a different stage in her life. Carrington also paints images that suggest spirituality.


___________________Leonora Carrington Voteaza___________________

____________________________
Louise Bourgeious (1911-2010) was an artist who dabbled in many looks - usually with an organic orientation. I like her surrealistic Femme Maison paintings. (I also like her gigantic cast spider).


___________________ Louise Bourgeious Femme-Maison___________________

From the Tate Modern site:

Femme Maison means ‘housewife’: literally, ‘woman house’. In these paintings, as in so much of her work, Bourgeois shows the home as an essentially female place, in which she can explore ideas about female identity. She said the Femme Maison ‘does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she is hiding’.

___________________Louise Bourgeious Femme-Maison___________________ (from 1945-6 - when her children were little. she also did a later version in marble)

Unlike Fini and Carrington, Bourgeious' images of the Femme Maison (as well as much of her other art) seem to deal more with life than the supernatural.

Leonardo da Vinci and Observation

____________________________
I listened to Sherwin Nuland's book about Leonardo on my way home from visiting out east. I noticed that Chris Nickson had blogged about it by trying to find one of Da VInci's quotes I had heard:

“Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses not his understanding but his memory.”

“Those who study the ancients and not the works of Nature are stepsons and not sons of Nature, the mother of all good authors.”

“The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes.”

It was interesting to hear about how extremely Da Vinci had observed and also how importantly he viewed sight in relation to other senses and ways of knowing. He was interested in energy, movement, and the "rhythmic harmonies of life".

He wanted to understand the muscles around the mouth because of their importance in facial expressions and because of his idea that the face was expression of the soul.

He was more of an anatomist than I realized - where he went beyond dissecting to understanding underlying structures and processes. I also thought it was interesting that he saw nature as the ultimate instead of relying on explanations from "God" as most still did then.

Notes from Nickson of Nuland:

He developed techniques to convey information through his drawings using cross-sections and multiple angles. Remarkably, centuries would pass before anatomical drawings became accepted as crucial for learning anatomy – indeed in his review of the 1858 first edition of ‘Gray’s Anatomy‘, Oliver Wendell Holmes actually criticized the book for including drawings.

Among Leonardo’s countless achievements in anatomy were:
• the deduction of the hierarchical structure of the nervous system, with the brain as a command center.
• the deduction that it was the retina of the eye that was sensitive to light, not the lens as previously believed. He learned to dissect the fragile structures of the eye by inventing new methods that involved sectioning the eye after it had been fixed by heating in egg whites.
• discovering the lesions of atherosclerosis and their possible role in obstruction of the coronary arteries. Even more remarkably, he presciently attributed these lesions to an “overabundance of nourishment” from the blood.
• the identification of the heart as muscle and speculations on the origin of body heat and the heart’s activity. He also discovered that the arterial pulse corresponds to ventricular contraction and that the ventricle shortens during contraction.
•the development of an understanding of mechanics by replacing muscles with wires. This allowed him to foreshadow Sherrington’s theory of reciprocal innervation of antagonistic muscles working across joints in complementary fashion. He was also able to work out specific actions such as that of biceps brachii, which he showed not only flexes the elbow but also supinates the hand through its twisting action on the ulna.
• working out that the tumescent penis becomes erect by filling with arterial blood, rather than air as previously supposed.
• the first to state that the mother’s contribution to the inherited characteristics of the fetus are equal to that of the father.

According to Nuland, one of Leonardo’s most impressive discoveries concerned the obscure topic of how aortic valves close. He determined that the aortic valves close while the ventricle is still contracted. This occurred because of the pressure created by eddy currents generated by the effect of the sinuses of Valsalva on blood flow through the proximal aorta. Leonardo elegantly demonstrated this using a model of the proximal aorta and ventricular outflow tract through which he allowed water containing millet to flow; the millet allowed visualization of the patterns of current and turbulence created in the flowing fluid. The rest of the world had to wait over 400 years, until 1969, for this ingeniously worked-out theory to be conclusively proven and (re)discovered using dye and cineradiography methods.

Hypatia & Raphael

I was reading about Hypatia and came across this:

Raphael was commissioned to paint The School of Athens for Pope Julius II. The fresco was to be painted above the philosophical section of the Pope’s personal library. In his original draft, Raphael placed Hypatia in the center, just below the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. The church fathers ordered her removal. Raphael still managed to sneak her into the fresco, however, disguised as another figure. Hypatia is the woman dressed in white in the lower left of the painting, looking directly out at the viewer. Hypatia, once condemned by a church father, now gazes out over the church fathers.

What a sad reflection on the church "fathers" that they had such a problem with a great woman philosopher being given a prominent position in a painting of philosophers. It is a prime example of men with authority using their power to keep women from being seen as having value equal to men.

In the final version, Painting Raphael painted Hypatia with some guy leering creepily at her. As if to say you can't have a woman in a painting without her being a distraction. Ugh.


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It is becoming easier to find out about women from history - but it takes effort - and knowing where to look.

Hypatia has a place at Judy Chicago's Dinner Party:


In addition to creating a great space for the "Dinner Party" (which is one resource for finding about some historical women), The Brooklyn Museum (& Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art) has a great website. It's great to be able to revisit the exhibit from home.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. - Hypatia