ANN STRASSMAN COOL
By George Wayne
ANN STRASSMAN—#gwsays will now declare it—is probably the most extraordinary, most certainly the coolest and chicest septuagenarian American artist plying her craft today. That was this arbiter’s first thought a few weeks ago studying the artist as she welcomed fans and collectors to her hugely appealing one woman show this Summer at the prestigious GBG in Soho. She’s dressed in vintage Rag & Bone leather pants and a loose black linen djelabba-type tunic. Offset by jet-black lacquered hair chopped to the cutest bob, and giving full-on Mary Quant meets Mary McFadden equals the coolest. ”AARP Mama”– anywhere in Soho that evening. Indeed, she could easily have stepped off the latest YSL runway. The fit was totally on that vibe– and the newest work of this celebrated Boston-based figurative painter, even more of the moment. She’s achieved fame and fortune in art for her often poignant and expressive realism portraiture, usually rendered on double-ply cardboard boxes as canvas. She’s out of the norm and thinking outside the box—every pun intended. ”Her portraits, the expressive realism of her unforgiving eye, capture the psychological tension of her subjects going about their daily lives,” her gallerist, George Berges, explains. Armed with her Sony RX point and shoot, the artist spends endless hours photographing, subterfuge, her possible subjects before retreating to her studio where her exaggerated brushstrokes and dramatic colors bring the work to life. Passing faces, small everyday situations, and curiosity propel her creative process; for her, the desire to reveal the person under the mask is irresistible. In the studio, Strassman layers and removes paint, scrapes and sands the surface–adds, subtracts and manipulates the cardboard to add a sense of physicality to the work.
Indeed, the life force pops from these renderings. They are not often pretty. But bold pigment marks come together, creating a powerful whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The subject is life, from people on the street to animals in the forest to flowers in the garden. And in this instance, the thread running through the theme of her latest work is that sense of waiting. ”Today, my studio is filled with images of people passing the time. They are waiting for the activity to begin. This new work is all about the angst that accompanies incessant waiting. We are all in this together– this universal sense of waiting. It starts in the morning, waiting for the barista to hand off that morning cup of coffee to those waiting at the doctor’s office, or waiting on the bus or train. The lives we live revolve around waiting.”
Never was that irony more apparent than the line of fans waiting to congratulate the artist on her latest oeuvre this July afternoon in the West Broadway gallery district of New York City. ”I want to get under the skin and take an image so compelling that the viewer feels the subject’s heartbeat,” she summed when the critic here had his moment to say hello. I use oil on canvas or cardboard. The two materials are quite different and produce two distinct results. Oil allows me to work more slowly as the paint remains wet and malleable for a considerable time. The acrylics on cardboard change their quality with every layer. At first, the paint is absorbed, but finally creates a surface where the pigment drifts and splashes on the surface. The juxtaposition of the graphics on the cardboard with the painterly marks forms an exciting contrast–man and machine.” The vibe–eco-conscious and sustainable urban art.
These striking new works most profoundly signify the notion of “waiting”, capturing urban street life on a “canvas” akin to urban life period– the multi-ply industrial-grade cardboard box. And that is the genius of Ann Strassman’s craft. They belong in a future LVMH print ad campaign for Rimowa luggage. There is no question that this artist’s work elevates the genre of portraiture to an entirely new level, and for her gallerist to entertain such further collaborative scenarios would be ideally on point. Nota Bene–Georges Berges Gallery.
