Nasty Women Art

2 - Melissa Lee talks about Growing up in South Georgia, the Existential in Art & Nasty Women / March 15, 2017 by Vivian Liddell

Melissa Lee on the existentialism behind her paintings:

I starting reading that (Nietzsche) in grad school because I was having to read some philosophy for an aesthetics class... I think what I like about existentialism is that you sort of own your own destiny in it, and at least how I read it, it doesn't seem to depend on other people and other things. ... Religion has always been so fascinating to me and how people can really dive into that. They seem to make it a reason for everything. And, so existentialism to me is just an anti-religion of some sort...

Born in Tennessee and raised in Georgia, contemporary artist Vivian Liddell interviews women on art & the South. Bringing together women of all sorts to talk about their inspirations and definitions of art, and how these individual opinions reflect our changing region.

Latest Posts

Peachy Keen

34 - Chalet Comellas-Baker (with guest co-host Stephanie Raines)—making art among Nashville sounds

about 2 years ago

Chalet Comellas-Baker on the inspiration for “The Lonesome Cut Up”:

I just watched this really cool documentary, you know, I'm living in Nashville now, so I had to watch that country music Ken Burns deal. So I was thinking about Hank Williams senior. And he wrote this song and the whippoorwill... he mentions the whippoorwill. I had already been looking up how the whippoorwill have been declining in population over the past, like from when he wrote it. This is what I looked up—from 1949 to present. What are the populations, the numbers for the whippoorwill? And they have been in steady decline. So I told him I was like, there's a project here, so I want to do something with this. But I'm not really sure what. One thing I was thinking about was I'll take the lyrics and I'll do this cutup technique. It's something that he used to do. It's something that David Bowie used to do. It's something a lot of musicians did. You just take it and the structure of it inspires the next iteration.

33 - Alice Stone-Collins—At Home Transforming the Mundane

about 3 years ago

Alice Stone-Collins on the process of working with cut paper:

It's the same thing I guess as if you were working on a painting and you knew it needed something and you would have to either rub something out and repaint on top of it. I guess the only difference is is I'm just doing it with with cut paper. I also kind of like building them from the ground up. Like I like the concept of painting that street with all those deer and seeing what it looked like before all the deer were put down. Any type of interior space —like again the bed and the bunnies— I like seeing the empty room just with the floorboards and then gluing the bed down. Like it's almost like you're like going through the process of adding fur(niture)— …It makes me feel a closer connection to the pieces and the places that I'm recreating.

32 - Jessica R. Smith—Overshot

about 3 years ago

Jessica R. Smith on the perceived value of woven coverlets in the 19th century:

The idea of weaving and being able to weave this beautiful—what we would call Op Art now—coverlet showed that you were a hard worker and you contributed to the material goods of the family... And the farmers would say “Well my daughter wove this beautiful coverlet—and this is because she made something that was utilitarian, that it was a material good. It was part of our... it's part of our family wealth and it's not just frivolous like embroidery or silk painting, Which I had never heard— like I'd never thought of that, right? And so, I thought well, isn't that interesting—this idea of you like making something that has actually utility... value to it. That it's a functional object is viewed having more value, right? Than this decorative object...

31 - Sonya Yong James—Phantom Threads

about 4 years ago

Sonya Yong James on taking risks and pushing herself in her work :

It seems like for the past...say...two or three years, I approach every single project, or show, or sculpture ...it's like a brand new thing. And it's actually really uncomfortable and it's really scary because when I do that—I just have to, it's just the way I work— I have to really push myself kind of to that edge. Particularly of not really knowing how something is going to turn out. And knowing also…too… there's a tremendous amount of risk, because you can really, really fail in a really spectacular and public way! Because, I mean, I tried to do a little bit of math because I have to be somewhat prepared, you know. But so, I had ...luckily, I was really lucky...I had a couple of interns helping me. And so we're tearing these bed sheets in The Contemporary, but then I had to move— and then into The Temporary— in the temporary little room space that I had and then I'm like trying to like kind of like lay down on the ground with a tape measure and like, measure it. And I do some math, and then think about what the size is going to be here. And do I have enough bed sheets? I mean, I know I bought every single bed sheet in Atlanta again. It better work! And that real kind of fear, you know, thatadrenaline. I mean, my adrenal glands in the month of November... but I don't know... it's worth it. You know, I kind of think too, as an artist, you want to have that feeling of wonder. I think as artists, that's the thing that we're always trying to hold on to…recapture.

30 - Colleen Merrill—Mirroring and Self-Affirmation through Art

about 4 years ago

Colleen Merrill on what inspired her research presentation “Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic”:

Looking at the child stages of development in regards to Donald Winnicott who was another psychoanalyst who wrote the book "Playing in Reality" from 1971… And that book hashes out a few of these different stages of development— mirroring the transitional object, social awareness— and how these things relate to a child's sort of creative impulse. And I'm like how...what a great sort of metaphor to think about that too for the artist—for the parent—that they're also going through a very similar type of developmental stage in their own right. You know they're also going through these sort of formative years that a child is going through at the same time. When we have children, we're emerging in our careers, we're emerging as artists. Why don't we sort of recognize that and discuss that more? So that's sort of what inspired it.

29 - Naomi Falk—Thinking in motion and embracing the uncomfortable

about 4 years ago

Naomi Falk on working with indigo dye:

I moved to South Carolina and I found out that it was historically a place where Indigo had been cultivated. And so... and that there were people doing it and that there was an indigo plant that was native to South Carolina —or something similar like that—along the coast and had been found again. Like they thought that it was no longer in existence and now it's still here and so they're cultivating it on a small scale again. But there's a long history of textile industry and … indigo production in the region, and so I thought that I would start, you know, learning more about that.