Observations by Adele Chatfield-Taylor FAAR '84, President, American Academy in Rome, October-November 2000 catalogue for Artin's exhibit at Gurari Collections, Boston:

"…Wendy Artin's paintings … are non-ideological, but infused with the shapes and forms that may have been originally classical but are now simply a means to an end….Wendy takes the same views that attract us all - the umbrella pine, the solitary column, the river god - and turns them into images we recognize but feel we have never really seen before. They are familiar but alive, fresh, and inevitable.

…Wendy Artin is made for Rome, with its agelessness, its heat, its complete passivity. She travels by bicycle with a slim folder of equipment slung over her shoulder and alights in one of the city's great piazza as though it had been built specifically for her eye to behold. Artin paints day in and day out, sometimes working on the same view, or the same statues, or the same dilapidated fountain over and over. You have the feeling that Artin has studied what she has chosen to paint and composed it in her mind, so that when she arrives at her destination, she can simply jump in. She has chosen her paper carefully - it is made of banana, jute, or some other textured, thick material that has the raggedy shape or found quality that makes it seem to belong to Rome's aeternitas. Her marks on that paper can be perfectly representational or completely abstract. They can seem three-dimensional or almost calligraphically spare. She does not sketch first or test the water in any way. She dives in.

She dives in, and she seems to burrow into her paper, disappear into it even. Then she comes back to our world with a catch: a fish, glimmering and wet, a cabbage, effusive, filling the page; or, at her absolute best, a human figure, or a ruin, or a moment of light still making its way to us, and by her act of catching it, rendered eternal.

Looking at Artin's paintings makes us understand why those who are loved have their portraits commissioned by those who love them, because once they are caught, they exist forever, or at least for as long as the picture lasts. It is an act of love. And Wendy Artin painting Rome, catching it this way, is an act of love. If the problem of art is to make something alive, in whatever language it takes to be understood, she has succeeded by inventing a language that has classical roots but a visceral immediacy."

Wendy Artin's work is in many public and private collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Public Library, the collection of Princess Caroline of Monaco, and the noted actress, Isabel Adjani. She was given a one person exhibit in the Wiggin Gallery of the Boston Public Library in 1996.  Wendy Artin's Drawings will be exhibited at the Augustus St. Gaudens Memorial museum in Cornish, New Hampshire, from September 7 - Oct. 31, 2002.

A selection of Wendy Artin's watercolor and sepia paintings may be seen at Kantar Fine Arts, on this website, and at the gallery at 382 Kenrick Street, Newton, MA 02458.   See also her own lovely website at wendyartin.com.

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