ARTE 344

Kally Hedegaard
Emmanuel Hernandez
 

Vija Celmins
1938-Present

Biography
Vija Celmins (born 1938) is an Latvian American artist born in Riga, Latvia. At the age of 10 she and her
family immigrated to the United States to settle in Indiana. In 1962, Celmins graduated with a BFA from
the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, and in 1965 she went on to study at the University of
California, Los Angeles, where she received an MFA .

 
 
 

She then got a position as an instructor at the California State College, Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1966,
before moving onto the University of California, Irvine, for the same position in 1967. She taught at the
latter school for the next five years.

Major Influences
Vija Celmins has been influenced by growing up during the Vietnam War, moving to America as a chilf
and not knowing any english, the artist Marcel Duchamp and his critique on Modern art, the physical,
natural world, newspaper and magazine images, the process of art-making, and the process by which
people live their lives. Duchamp’s influence is seen in ​Concentric Bearings D.​ which is a print made from
drypoint, mezzotint, and aquatint. Celmins drew Duchamp’s sculpture then used photogravure technique
to create a photograph to be turned into a print, shown here. Other influences present in this example is
the falling plane that Celmins drew from a newspaper clipping . This image was a part of her childhood,
and her memories of seeing planes in the air are those of awe and fear; being interested in the machine in
the air, but also fearing the implications of the plane’s mission in her country that is of war. ​Concentric
Bearings D. ​is also juxtaposed with an image of a starry sky, the natural and scientific phenomenal
influence on her artwork and her life. The arrangement of these images in one composition summarizes
the influences on Celmins. Her past experiences are connected to her current life and the influences she

 
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has been subjected to for decades of art-making.

Concentric Bearings D. (1985)

Inspiration

“I see drawing as thinking, evidence of getting from one place to another. One draws to define one thing
from another ... I tend to take very small increments and steps in changing. An example was that I had
been working with the pencil and I began to see that the graphite itself had a certain life to it. So I did a
series of images of oceans and deserts using different grades of graphite and pushing each one to its limit.
I learned a lot about the possibilities of expressiveness in graphite by doing this. Then I moved into the
galaxy drawings. Even though you may think they came from lying under the stars, for me, they came out
of loving the blackness of the pencil. It’s almost as if I was exploring the blackness of the pencil along
with the image that went with it.”

(Quoted in ​Drawing as Thinking​, [pp.1-2].)

Notable Works

 
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Web #1 (1999)

Web #1 ​is a large charcoal drawing on paper of a spider’s web, based on a found photograph and not the
direct observation of nature. It is signed and dated by the artist beneath the bottom right corner of the
drawing. The charcoal drawing is positioned centrally on a large sheet of landscape-oriented paper and is
contained by a relatively neat border – achieved by placing a piece of card around the image as the
charcoal background is worked into the paper and to the edges, creating a softly feathered, rather than
precise, linear border.

 
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Ocean (1975)

Ocean i​ s one of a set of four lithographs Celmins made from pencil drawings of a day sky, a night sky and
an area of rocky desert earth. The lithographs were produced in an edition of seventy-five, of which Tate’s
copies are the artist’s proofs. The set was printed by the Cirrus Press, Los Angeles and published by the
artist.

References

Earliest Influences, Early Works, (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from
https://art21.org/read/vija-celmins-earliest-influences-early-works/

 
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Modern and Contemporary Art. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from
https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/43792

Tate. (1999, January 01). 'Web #1', Vija Celmins, 1999. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-web-1-ar00164

Tate. (1975, January 01). 'Ocean', Vija Celmins, 1999. Retrieved October 05, 2020, from
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-ocean-p78336

Vija Celmins. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from

http://www.artnet.com/artists/vija-celmins/biography

Vija Celmins. (n.d.). Retrieved October 05, 2020, from

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/88809/night-sky-18

 
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