Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins immigrated to the United States with her family from Latvia when she was ten years old. She and her family settled in Indiana. Celmins received international attention early in her career for her renditions of natural scenes, often painted from photographs lacking a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of field. Celmins work includes oil painting, charcoal, and printmaking. Her early work bears interesting relationships with that of Gerhard Richter, the German painter (her contemporary). The early paintings share Richter's slightly "fuzzy" photo-realistic style, and some were executed with no colour, just using black and white and greys made from black and white paint. Celmins early work includes paintings of such commonplace objects as TVs, lamps and black and white photographs. These works also share with Richter's an apparent randomness and thus apparently dispassionate attitude. It is as if any photograph would do as a source for a painting, and the choice is apparently unimportant. This is of course not the case, but the work contains within it the impression that the image is chosen at random from an endless selection of possible alternative images of similar nature.

Celmins is now internationally known for her later works which are often intensely realistic paintings and drawings. Celmins has also worked with print media since the early 1960s, again meticulously rendering details of the natural environment. Celmins's work demonstrates a remarkably close engagement with the natural world mediated by photography. Celmins has said her images dispel romantic notions of the sublime in nature.

In the late 1960s, Celmins started drawing more, mainly working with the humble graphite pencil. Her subjects became increasingly selective until her work became almost entirely images of the surface of the ocean, night skies (with stars), and the surface of the desert, with small stones and pebbles rendered in great detail.

Celmins' work contains a sense of calm, silence, and contempation. One is faced with an intense, beautiful and serene view of nature. Her drawings transcend their base materials (paper, graphite) and take the viewer to a new level of awareness.