Pictus & Writ:
Essays by Ellen Carey
2008-2019
Pictus & Writ finds the artist tradition of writing on other artists.
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Published Essays:
Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing #1131, Whirls and twirls, 2004
Image © 2015 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. All Rights Reserved.
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Color Me Real
Sol LeWitt: 100 Views
MASS MoCA Catalog
Yale University Press
2009
In 2004 the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford commissioned its final site-specific wall drawing by Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawing #1131: Whirls and twirls. Situated at the entrance to the Great Hall, this vivid room-encompassing work is flanked by white marble staircases, with a stained-glass skylight overhead. LeWitt’s drawing transforms these walls, replacing the formerly pale architectural planes with bright, intense color. Large segmented bands of primary colors coexist happily with segments of purple, green, and orange. (more)
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Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait), 1935
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
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At Play with Man Ray
Aperture Magazine, Issue #204
Fall 2011
The Surrealist artists were notoriously fond of activities and games that tap the subconscious. In the well-known Surrealist game Cadavre exquis (Exquisite corpse), one participant initiates a drawing and passes it to another to continue, who passes it to the next, and so on, until the work is deemed finished. Or consider the act of “automatic drawing,” pioneered by André Masson in the 1920s, in which the artist’s hand moves without conscious purpose across the page, creating in the process an image. The Surrealists regularly looked to the subconscious for inspiration; it was their radical modus operandi, an entryway to uncharted territories through which they often used ludic strategies as their means.
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David Hockney, Noya + Bill Brandt with Self-Portrait (Although they were watching this picture being made), Pembroke Studios, 8th, May '82
1982
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In Hamlet’s Shadow
The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation
Delmonico-Prestel Press
2013
The prescient Polaroid slogan See What Develops could be a metaphor for my history with this instant photographic technology. What an invention! My love for all things Polaroid was equally instant – l‘amour fou — crazy, madly, wildly in love as “seen” at first sight. It all began in the halcyon days of the 1970s, where Polaroid’s “point and shoot” met my experiments in photography and art: an ideal fit, if ever there was one. It paralleled the cultural sea changes of that time in feminism, war, politics, music. And where was photography? On the edge, ready for change: for Polaroid, in other words, the shape shifter, an agent of revolution in creative, visual thinking. (more)