Vincencia Blount, Georgia Marsh, 1984. Oil and paper on canvas. Gift of Judith Alexander. Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia.
The artist Vincencia Blount, known as Tatty to her friends, created drawings informed by ancient and imagined places. Blount was born in Florida in 1924 and died in Atlanta in 2012, where she lived most of her days, making artwork well into her eighties. She was bold and prolific, exhibiting in the South and New York at a time when art by women was often not considered worthy of wall space. She was recognized as being a part of a nationally respected stable of artists presented by Judith Alexander, one of the vibrant founders of Atlanta’s contemporary and folk art scenes.
An avid traveler, Blount was fascinated by ancient cultures. Curator and art historian David Houston, who helped organize a 2004 retrospective of Blount’s work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, wrote of “her love of pre-Columbian cities and other urban sites. She would look at archeological plans/maps of the sites, many of them she personally visited, and transform them into elegant abstract color field paintings.” Her exploration of the caves of Lascaux in southwestern France, where cave walls are covered with some of the oldest paintings known to humans, was pivotal.
Blount’s artwork is dynamic in attitude and ideas. Her sensibility is expressed through her intellectual approach to abstraction. Brush strokes, bleeds, and splashes on canvas, overlapping textures with a brilliant sense of color relationships make her large oil paintings seem like broad worlds to fall into.
MAKE YOUR OWN ABSTRACT PAINTING USING PLASTIC PRINTMAKING
SUPPLIES:
PAINT
PAINTBRUSH
PLASTIC (ZIPLOC BAG OR CLING FILM)
PAPER
PAINT YOUR PLASTIC
FLIP YOUR PLASTIC OVER AND PRESS IT DOWN ON THE PAPER
TADA! ABRSTACT PAINTING
