Tag: Fine Arts

Baker Gallery Walker Fine Arts Center, Woodberry Forest School. “New Works,” landscape paintings featuring scenes from Charlottesville by Richard Crozier. Through December 31. First Fridays reception.

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. A small-works open exhibit featuring over 30 artists, including Meredith Bennett, Susan Trimble, Joan Griffin, Frannie Joseph, and Judith Ely. Through December 19.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Listen,” paintings and sculptures by Aggie Zed. Through December 17. First Fridays reception.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Reclaimed,” a colorful mixed-media collection from Sigrid Eilertson. First Fridays opening.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” and other exhibitions.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center  233 Fourth St. NW. “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art,” includes works from 11 African American artists. Through January 7. 

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Perspectives on Place,” paintings that offer differing perspectives on place from Richard Crozier and David Hawkins. Through December 22. Lunch and conversation with artists December 4, 12:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. On December 4, Winterfest, featuring family-friendly art activities, a scavenger hunt, music, food, fire dancer, and more. Through December 31, the Holiday Show and Shop features two floors of original art, home goods, prints, cards, and jewelry. First Fridays celebration with live music and a screening of Horse Teacher, a documentary by Shandoah Goldman. 

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. David Askew considers their relationship with social media through paintings of posted selfies in “i decided to do nothing (about everything).” Through December 22. First Fridays opening, 5pm.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. “Winter’s Edge,” new works by Cate West Zahl that pay homage to the simplification that takes place during the winter season.

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. Two exhibitions from photographer, scientist, and conservationist Michael O. Snyder. “The Mountain Traditions Project” showcases photographs and oral histories from the Appalachian region. “Our Changing Climate: A Visual Chronicle” features works from Snyder’s former students. On December 3, the annual PVCC Pottery Club Sale.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “Conversations,” recent individual mixed-media works by Mary Scurlock and Diego Sanchez, as well as nine works that are the result of months of collaboration between the two artists. Through December 11.

Ruffin Gallery 179 Culbreth Rd., UVA Grounds. “Breaking Water,” collaborative works from Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant. Through December 9.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Her Deeds,” mixed-media installations by Mariana Parisca. In the Dové Gallery, “Visions of Mary,” linocut prints, painting, and installation by Ramona Martinez. Through January 21. First Fridays opening.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “ar.ti.fac.tu.al,” works from local artists Kim Boggs and Mike Fitts. Through January 19. First Fridays opening.

Telegraph Art & Comics 211A W. Main St., Downtown Mall, and 398 Hillsdale Dr. Todd Webb’s annual “Picture Show” is on display at both locations. Through January 15. First Fridays reception at 5pm at the downtown location. 

Vault Virginia 300 E. Main St. “Final Bill,” an exhibition from Bill Atwood in a variety of mediums, including ink on newsprint, mixed-media collage, and sculpture. Through December. First Fridays reception.

Yellow Cardinal Studio 301 E. Market St. First Fridays open house with various artists and artworks. Also open Friday and Saturday afternoons from 1-5pm during December.

With the series of paintings that make up Kristopher Castle’s engaging show “Curriculum Vitae” at Phaeton Gallery, the artist explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village and his innovative ideas for education. As the title suggests, the exploration is not a discourse on the UVA founder’s achievements, but rather the artist’s deeply personal relationship to Jefferson’s ideals and his university.

Quorum Pars Fui (“Of which I was also a part”) pays homage to that. In the work, a disembodied hand, Castle’s own, holds the end of a diaphanous ribbon that weaves through the colonnade that runs along the top of UVA’s Lambeth Field. A metaphor for Castle’s life, the fabric references his close ties not only to Lambeth, where he spent the summer of 2001 working at UVA’s costume shop during the Heritage Repertory Theatre’s season, but also, the larger university and Jefferson himself. That summer was a seminal experience for Castle, introducing him to Jefferson and his university, and charting the course that would eventually lead Castle back to the area to live.

Initius (“Commencement”) revisits the fabric of life motif. Here, the fabric’s tail can be seen at the far end of the colonnade that runs along the side at the base of the Rotunda. It’s fluttering away from us, about to leave the Academical Village to commence its existence outside those hallowed walls.

Ab Eo Libertas A Quo Spiritus (“The spirit comes from him from whom liberty comes”) updates the seated statue of Jefferson from the west side of the South Lawn, so that he is shown having just broken a tiki torch across his knee. The allusion is to the assault on the university that occurred in 2017, when protesters wielded these hitherto benign objects in an action that recalled Nazi Germany’s torch-lit parades, albeit with a Walmart touch. Jefferson’s left foot rests on volumes of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, all major figures of the Enlightenment. This movement, so influential to Jefferson (and other founding thinkers like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and John Adams), featured rationality and knowledge as its basic tenets.

Castle performs a similar treatment on George Washington in his version of the statue that sits on the east side of the Lawn. Exitus Acto Probat (“The outcome is the test of the act”) depicts Washington covering the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol representing the American patriarchy, with his cape. Castle places tomes by Foucault, Derrida, and Marx—all of whom, according to Castle, would “celebrate [a] critical and punitive reevaluation of [Washington’s] efforts”—at the base of the statue. They are teetering precariously, held in place by Washington’s cane, suggesting he is tolerating them despite their criticism. With this iconography, Castle reminds us of Washington’s integrity. Committed to the freedoms laid out in the First Amendment (freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to protest peacefully and petition the government), Washington led selflessly—twice renouncing absolute power. These are important considerations in both assessing Washington’s record, as well as the current events surrounding the 2020 election and January 6.

Inexplicabilis Libertas (“Illimitable freedom of the human mind”) alludes specifically to Jefferson’s vision for his institution of higher learning. For Jefferson, the expansive vista of the Blue Ridge Mountains, once visible beyond the south end of the Lawn, was a tangible representation of the illimitable freedom of the human mind, which is why his original plan kept the area opposite the Rotunda open. It remained this way until Old Cabell Hall, designed by Stanford White in 1898, was erected. Castle paints the building as a transparent ghost of itself through which we can see the view Jefferson always wanted us to see. The nocturnal scene also includes Castle as a young man, exercising his own form of illimitable freedom in the form of streaking the Lawn, a time-honored tradition at UVA.

Omnium Curriculum Gatherum (“Gather all the history”) is arguably the apotheosis of the show. A quintych composed of five panels, the work gives Castle plenty of room to depict Jefferson’s vision for the Academical Village made manifest in both its educational and physical forms. In his rendering, Castle makes it clear that his vision is not sealed in amber, but is changing and flourishing—a fundamentally viable and timeless approach to education and society that has bent, adjusted, and endured. 

Castle has a great time conjuring Jefferson’s original course curriculum (anatomy and medicine, fine arts, ethics and grammar, modern languages, zoology and botany, ancient languages, physio-mathematics, history and government, pure mathematics, natural philosophy, and law) with a diverse cast of human counterparts dressed in modern clothes. Castle’s professional experience as a costume designer comes in handy here in his selection of clothing and accessories that identify the various disciplines represented. His admiration for Jefferson’s architecture is evident in his detailed rendering of the Rotunda and pavilions I-IV, which feature respectively the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric (again) architectural orders used by Jefferson with the intention of educating and elevating the student body. In the painting, the pavilions appear left to right: III, I, II, IV.

Rounding out the show are Castle’s riffs on the secret society emblems seen on various surfaces around Grounds. These delightful trompe l’oeil works of writing on brick play with the original symbols turning the esoteric into the often amusing contemporary reference.

It feels like Carnival time at Second Street Gallery. Megan Marlatt’s vibrant paintings and eye-popping big head sculptures are on view and the space sings with boisterous energy. Festival themes loom large in her show entitled “Mummers,” and though Carnival doesn’t officially begin for a couple of months, its fall equivalent is happening right now. As we head into winter, we celebrate seasonal change with Halloween and Día de Muertos, which, like Carnival, feature magic and costumes.

For an artist like Marlatt, who has built her career as a painter, her big heads may seem like a departure, but from the moment she first saw a capgrosso (“big head” in Catalan), she was smitten. Her fascination prompted her to travel to Spain in 2010 to learn how to make capgrossos from renowned folk artists Ventura and Hosta. 

“Through the big heads, I became very interested in the rituals of European carnivals,” says Marlatt. In 2018, she returned to Europe, this time to Belgium, where she studied Carnival culture at the International Carnival and Mask Museum.

“In Binche, Carnival participants carry little brooms, which they use to sweep the ground,” says Marlatt. “They’re sweeping away the evils of winter to make way for spring. If they don’t do this, winter will never go away. In Bulgaria, they use sticks to beat the ground, waking spring up. 

“These are pagan rituals adopted by the church. So Lent … coincides with the time when food supplies would be running low. When Carnival occurs, it’s not yet spring, the vernal equinox hasn’t happened. It’s the in-between time when it’s not one thing or the other, and it’s during this liminal period that magic happens.” 

Transition is not just evident in the shifting in-between-time, but also in the act of donning a mask and changing one’s identity. For Marlatt, this is a powerful exercise in empathy. “What I love about masks (and big heads) is they‘re empathetic,” she says. “They erase age, species, race, gender. They allow you to play at being someone else, get inside their skin and empathize with their lot.” Marlatt explores these ideas further in her paintings of Wysteria Ivy, who, as a drag queen, both occupies a transitional space and assumes another identity.

On display are both animal and human heads—there’s a hare, a rooster, the Belgian painter James Ensor, sisters Salt and Pepper, and even a heavenly host of angels. Instantly appealing, the heads seem benign at first. But there’s something sinister and manic about them. Marlatt employs the masks in various ways: some are one-offs that she uses in her Big Head Brigade parades and performances, while others, she incorporates into her paintings, where they sometimes appear as masks worn by figures. Some have entirely morphed into otherworldly creatures.

With its vivid palette and striking imagery, “Wysteria Ivy and the Woodland Creatures” is a captivating and glorious work that presents its subject lounging odalisque-like on a picnic table within a covered shelter. Perched astride the roof, a grinning red bunny sports track shoes, while two mischievous mice tiptoe around the sides of the structure. Marlatt conveys the atmospheric elements in the painting with complete authenticity, which anchors the work in reality. 

We are coaxed by familiarity into accepting the fantastical elements as Marlatt creates a space of transition between reality and fantasy using ordinary references—the table and shelter and the familiar clothes her animals wear root the picture in the here and now. She performs a similar thing with her big heads, which each sport some real item—a crocheted hat (made by local artist Eli Frantzen), a scarf, or a bell—all of which enhance their immediacy.

“Near Gloaming” offers a crepuscular yin to the sunny yang of Wysteria Ivy back at the picnic grounds. The two paintings are the same size and each feature spindly trees that rise across the picture plane in dynamic vertical rhythm. Here, the fairy tale forest is alight with fireflies. Wysteria Ivy, holding a sunflower, crouches on the ground, gazing at the viewer warily. Disturbing the idyll, a figure wearing a hare mask stands to her right. Smudges of lemony paint between the trees suggests the sun’s last light, blurred by misty air.

In these two paintings, Wysteria Ivy is painted outdoors—an unusual place for her to be. According to Marlatt, Wysteria Ivy assumes her persona only in the safe space of her bedroom, interacting with the outside world exclusively online. In Marlatt’s version, she is able to step outside her protected realm and roam free.

While she acknowledges that her work possesses surreal elements, Marlatt resists being classified as a surrealist. Perhaps magical realism is a more accurate description of an artist who feels “the world is full of mythologies and miracles.”

“Those who would follow a hard stoic line of practicality and logic are just fooling themselves,” says Marlatt. “They think they’re above mystic thinking, but then often they acquire a drinking problem for all their logical realism. They believe they can get rid of mythology in their life, but all we really can do is replace one mythology with another.”

Artisans Studio Tour Various locations around central Virginia. Tour the workshops of over 30 artisans. November 12-13.

The Bebedero 201 W. Main St. “Art Inspired by the Spirit.” Local artists created original art based on their experiences with mezcal and tequila. $30, November 6, 6pm.

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. A small works exhibit featuring over 30 artists, including Meredith Bennett, Joan Griffin, and Judith Ely. Through December 19. Reception November 8, 4pm. First Fridays opening.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Listen,” paintings and sculpture from Aggie Zed. Through December 17.

Corner Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA Grounds. “Edankraal en Route: Reviving an African American Space of Cultural Exchange in Segregated Lynchburg,” projects by UVA faculty, students, and area middle school students inspired by Harlem Renaissance poet, Anne Bethel Spencer. Through November 30. Reception November 10, 5pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd. “Small Graces” features photography by Bill Mauzy. Through November 30. 

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Walks with Color,” works from  ceramic artist Trina Player. First Fridays opening.

Elmaleh Gallery Campbell Hall, UVA Grounds. “Mise-en-Scène: The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes,” from urbanist Chris Reed and photographer Mike Belleme. Through November 18.

The Fralin Museum of Art 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” and other exhibitions.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art,” includes works from 11 African American artists. Through January 7. 

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Visions of the Rainforest,” mixed-media paintings by Dominique Astruc Anderson. In the First Floor Hallway, “Mindscapes, Landscapes, and Insights” by Lisa Macchi, and “Do the Trees Speak Back to the Wind” by Lindsay Diamond and Jeannine Regan. In the Second Floor Hallway, “Everything Paper,” a McGuffey member group exhibition. The Holiday Member’s Show and Shop opens November 22. First Fridays openings.

McIntire Connaughton Gallery Rouss and Robertson Halls, UVA Grounds. “From Water and Wheels to Abstracted Ideals,” acrylic and oil on canvas by Eric Cross and Stan Sweeney. Through December 9.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. Kristopher Castle’s “Curriculum Vitae” explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia through a series of paintings. Through December 2. 

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. Through September 9, the Annual Student Exhibition. Opening September 23, the Annual Faculty Exhibition and a retrospective of works from PVCC’s “The Fall Line” literary magazine. Through November 9.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “Conversations,” recent individual mixed-media works by Mary Scurlock and Diego Sanchez, as well as nine works that are the result of months of collaboration between the two artists. Through December 11.

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. A. “Three Decades,” mixed-media collage from Ellen Moore Osborne.

Ruffin Hall Gallery 179 Culbreth Rd., UVA Grounds. “Breaking Water,” the collaborative work of Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant examines the profound psychological impact of ecological breakdown. Through December 9.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St.
SE. In the Main Gallery, “Mummers,” a series of paintings and large sculptural big head masks inspired by the theme carnival by Megan Marlatt. In the Dové Gallery, “The Ceremony of Innocence,” paintings by Los Angeles-based surrealist artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman. Through November 18.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “About Face: Pt.1 Siren Eyes,” digital portraits by 12-year-old, self-taught artist Samari Jones. Through November 27. Artist talk and happy hour, November 17, 5pm. First Fridays opening.

Visible Records 1740 Broadway St. “Any Person I Have Robbed Was Judged By Me,” a solo show of photography by Sebastien Boncy. Through December 2.

Spooky, scary images send shivers down your spine at The Great Rotumpkin. The seasonal celebration blends the architecture of the Rotunda with pop-up projections to create a variety of haunting scenes featuring new designs from multimedia artist Jeff Dobrow. Eerie music accompanies visceral vignettes of dancing skeletons, ghostly graveyards, bubbling cauldrons, ghoulish pumpkins, and more.

Through 10/31. Free, 7pm. The Rotunda, UVA Grounds. arts.virginia.edu

Remixing, riffing, playing with memes: These are artistic modes that we sometimes think of as belonging to our own time, as though it was only in the 20th century, and only in Western countries, that artists began to knowingly recycle material. Think Roy Lichtenstein, Beastie Boys, and anybody who’s used the image of RBG’s lace collars. But artmaking has involved self-conscious imitation for a lot longer, and in a lot more places—including several hundred years ago in Asia, as revealed in “Earthly Exemplars,” a small exhibition of Buddhist art now showing at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA.

“The exhibition features materials mainly from the 17th through 19th centuries,” says curator Clara Ma. “That was a time when there was lots of cultural exchange and diplomatic exchange between Qing China and Tibet, and also there are connections between China and Edo Japan through trade.” In choosing pieces to highlight—from elaborate paintings called thangkas to sculpture to an astonishing painting on the leaf of a Bodhi tree—Ma hopes to demonstrate that China, Tibet, and Japan were involved in a complex swirl of cross-influences. 

Walking into the show at The Fralin, that concept probably wouldn’t hit you immediately. Instead, you might be struck by the delicacy and precision of, say, a painting from Tibet, made in the 17th or 18th century, showing the Goddess of the Victorious White Parasol. She has a long name (Ushnisha Sitatapatra), a thousand faces, and a thousand arms, which are actually depicted in a dizzying, overlapping arrangement like a sunburst or a bullseye. Her ferocious power—maybe even greater than a Supreme Court justice—contrasts with the serenity of the deities around her, and the loveliness of flowers and leaves.

Or you might be drawn to a thangka, also Tibetan, showing the life story of Pindola Bharadvaja, an arhat—a disciple of the Buddha, that is, venerated in his own right. In this piece, he sits on a throne in the center of the painting, surrounded by vignettes from his biography. The piece is lush and rich, even with a constrained palette of red, green, blue, and white; it conjures a whole world and a lifetime. And Ma says its landscape, and the ornate Chinese-style throne on which the arhat sits, are elements a Tibetan artist would have borrowed from the art of the Qing dynasty. “There would be missionaries or diplomats the Qing sent to Tibet with gifts of paintings, or vice versa,” she explains. “So the style or the composition, they got influenced through these exchanges.”

She says we can think of these connections like souvenirs—bringing home a new idea for how an image could look or a technology for making something, like the woodblock print that closes the show. But maybe an even better analogy is fashion. To get dressed is to refer to any number of cultures and histories, making oneself a living library of clothes. A Japanese album from around 1695, made by a court painter named Kanō Tsunenobu, amounts to an artistic wardrobe: Tsunenobu used the album to demonstrate his mastery of different painting styles, including the loose, poetic look of the paintings Ma highlights.

“The way he created it was to study Chinese painting at the court,” she says. “At the time, China was the center of Zen, and lots of Japanese monks went to China. They’d bring back a lot of the Chinese paintings. He’s making the claim, setting up that lineage for his own art school: ‘We have these deep connections, our school has this long history.’”

It sounds very modern, like a 21st-century piano student learning Bach one day and Scott Joplin the next. “I guess one way to see that is that these artists, for them to establish their own identity is not to come up with something totally new, it’s to connect themselves to different traditions.”

There’s even another layer of borrowing going on here, she points out—one that she wasn’t able to represent in this show. “They are all making connections to India,” she says, “but I didn’t select any Indian artworks. It’s all about these regions trying to connect back to India.”

Lincoln Perry has been a prominent figure on the Charlottesville art scene since the mid-1980s. An acclaimed muralist with significant work in landscapes, figurative paintings, and sculpture, Perry’s murals grace walls around the country including the Met Life building in St. Louis and at the University of Virginia. “The Student’s Progress,” in UVA’s Old Cabell Hall, follows the journey of a fictional student named Shannon from her undergraduate days into her adulthood when she becomes a professor at the university. Consisting of 29 panels, the piece took 16 years to complete.

Perry first visited Charlottesville in 1970, and returned 15 years later to fill in for Philip Geiger, teaching drawing for a semester at UVA. It was during this time that he met his wife, author Ann Beattie, who was also teaching at UVA. After about a decade, the couple left Charlottesville, but returned in 2001. Both held teaching positions until 2012. They now divide time between Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

 C-VILLE caught up with Perry in Maine, where he was fresh off an interview with the local NPR affiliate, to talk about his new book, Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others. He will discuss the book at New Dominion Bookshop on the Downtown Mall on Saturday, October 22.

C-VILLE Weekly: I think of you as a painter. Have you always written?

Lincoln Perry: No, in fact, I just came across a notebook I kept in 1981 that’s really badly written. So, somewhere along the line, I think maybe from living with Ann, I must have improved.

I was struck by the quality of your writing. There are numerous beautifully written paragraphs—I loved, in particular, your descriptions of the Bruegels. I also liked the way you integrated modern references and popular culture into your writing, it struck me as akin to what you did with paint in the Cabell Hall mural.

That’s actually interesting. I hadn’t even thought of that.

I would think your narrative talent would serve you well helping you
conceive of murals.

Yes. I wish I could do more of them. The hard part is getting the job. I was just a finalist for a courthouse in Alabama. It would have been fun. I enjoy the external collaboration of projects like that.

Are you continuing to write, and if so, how do you balance that with artmaking?

I can only paint for so long and I can only sculpt for so long, or draw for so long. Writing is a way to fill in the chinks between those other bricks.

I love the way the little sketches included in the book make us see the art through your eyes and pay attention to what you are looking at.

Some part of me thought I should make them more diagrammatic, but then I decided that doesn’t do justice to the things, so, I did my best to do copies.

What are you looking for when you look at art?

The book was originally going to be called Stealing from Museums, but the trouble was they thought it would be put in the crime section. But that’s really what it’s about—how painters and potentially non-painters learn to see in different ways. I think a lot of people are intimidated by visual art; they think there’s something they’re supposed to be getting. It’s a visual experience first. Let it wash over you and take pleasure in it. The idea is not to be intimidated or exhausted. It’s best to see some things well as opposed to trying to see everything. When I first went to Italy, I had one of the Blue Guides and I thought, because it was in the book, I had to go see it, and it became insane. Eventually, I realized that you can get more out of less.

I didn’t realize, until I read the book, that you sculpted. Is that something you’ve always done?

That started about 30 years ago. Difficulty interests me. Making a sculpture that’s legible and enticing from 360 degrees as opposed to, say, one view or two views is really difficult. About three years ago I started carving marble, which is ridiculously difficult. It’s almost too much: I feel like, c’mon, I’m too old for this. The stuff weighs a ton and is hard as a rock. But it does make me realize I spend at least as much time in museums looking at sculpture as I do paintings. They have to be seen in the round and, as I say in the book, you really have to be there in “the presence of” in order to read them properly. Which is also true of paintings, more than people know.

Describe a dream art-viewing trip.

A dream trip would be returning to the Villa Valmarana ai Nani in Vicenza, Italy, to see the Tiepolo frescoes. I also want to see Naples again because of the museums there.

As a successful creative person married to a successful creative person, how do you give equal opportunity to your respective practices?

Well, I read everything she writes, but not until she feels it’s done. It’s harder for me to lure her into the studio. She has a very good eye, but she’s really more interested in photography; she takes beautiful photographs—I think she should publish them. Painting’s a little mysterious to her and she wishes I wouldn’t carve marble because I’m getting old and I’ve got arthritis and she wonders what I’m doing this for. I totally respect what she does. I enjoy writing these essays but I cannot imagine writing fiction, and she can’t imagine painting. I suppose there are happy marriages among two painters or two writers, but in our case, it works well that we’re in different fields. 

Any upcoming exhibitions?

I’ll be in “Home and Away,” organized by Robert Stuart at the Beverley Street Studio School Gallery in Staunton, which runs from November 18 to January 2.

I hope the last line of the book sums it up. (“This isn’t the anxiety of influence; it’s the joy of influence.”) This is all supposed to be about the joy of influence. Rather than feeling oppressed or confused or intimidated by our tradition, we’re allowed to love it and enjoy it because it’s beautiful. It’s something we’ve done as humans that we can actually be proud of.

From the opening lines of The Marriage Portrait, author Maggie O’Farrell does not hedge: The Duchess of Ferrara will die. As historical fiction based on the real life and death of the 16-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici—the details were set in stone more than 460 years ago—this new novel probes the who and the how through a vibrant exploration of passion and fate. 

Woven between sections describing the hours leading up to the Duchess’ death in Fortezza are lush and melodic stretches that detail Lucrezia’s childhood in Florence and eventually follow her as she is condemned to marry the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II de’Este, and move to Ferrara to live with his family and provide an heir. Lucrezia is utterly singular for much of her life, an odd child in her father’s court and a naive, young wife once in her husband’s unfamiliar world. As the two timelines converge and death draws near, O’Farrell succeeds in creating a striking portrait of a spirited young woman, as untamed in her desire to live as she is in her appreciation of the world in painterly detail.

O’Farrell is the author of other acclaimed novels, a memoir, and even two books for young readers. But she is perhaps best known for Hamnet, the 2020 historical novel about Shakespeare’s son and the nature of grief, which won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, among other accolades. 

A pivotal moment in The Marriage Portrait occurs in Lucrezia’s childhood, after her father purchases a tigress to add to his menagerie housed in the Sala dei Leoni of their castello in Florence. Upon surreptitiously witnessing the animal’s arrival in the dead of night, young Lucrezia later visits her cage and experiences a transcendent moment of connection with the exquisite beast, a moment in time that proves to have a lasting impact on her life and reputation. “Her life, her name, her family and all that surrounded her receded and became void. She was aware only of her own heart, and that of the tigress.” 

The themes of bestial prowess and fecundity that run throughout the novel are seen most vividly in Lucrezia’s obsession with the tigress as well as other animals’ majesty, pulsing with the threat of savagery while mirroring her own feelings of imprisonment. Though trapped in the gender politics of Renaissance Italy—where high-born women are only to marry and give birth while men are born to rule—Lucrezia is steadfast in her sense of self. When challenged, she is certain that her spirit “might uncurl, crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, furling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth.” 

Unlike the other women in the high courts where she spends her time, Lucrezia defies the expectations of family and tradition, again and again. Even when faced with the certainty of her death, she pokes fun at the performance of social graces: “Her husband, who means to kill her, either by his own hand or by his order to another, takes up the end of his napkin and dabs at his cheek with its pointed corner, as if a spot of soup on one’s face is a matter of importance.”

As a result, the only authentic relationships Lucrezia seems to have are the bonds with the servants in her life, pointing to the alienation that she feels from her own ruling class. Her maid, Emilia, in many ways saves her, offering a connection to her childhood, her true self, and a nurturing that she rarely received since she left the care of her nursemaid, Sofia, from whom she learned a Neapolitan dialect as a secret language that endures into adulthood. In the care she receives from Emilia and Sofia, Lucrezia experiences rare moments of real love and affection. This is also true in her connection with Jacopo, a painter apprenticed to the master Il Bastianino, who is commissioned to paint the eponymous marriage portrait. When completed, Lucrezia sees as “another self, a former self … a self who, when she is dead and buried in her tomb, will endure, will outlive her, who will always be smiling from the wall, one hand poised to begin painting.” 

In the end, the Duchess is entombed in the portrait but freed by her own painting, which she began to practice as a child and continued to use as a creative outlet and coping mechanism. Her small artworks are thick with underpaintings that depict hidden desires and other lives expressed only when she is alone, before being covered up again by more acceptable paintings of animals and plants. Despite also being used against her by the tempestuous and vindictive Alfonso, Lucrezia’s artwork, her vivid appreciation of the natural world, and even an appreciation for her own animal body, all provide her with enduring strength. Indeed, at its heart, this is a sensuous novel about the ways that art and language might save us, even when all seems lost. 

October Exhibitions

Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 170 McCormick Rd., UVA Grounds. “No Unity Without Justice” centers around the work of UVA students and Charlottesville community racial justice activists who organized demonstrations and events in response to Charlottesville’s 2017 Summer of Hate. Through October 29. “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” photographs taken by Charlottesville photographer Rufus Holsinger during the height of the Jim Crow era.

Baker Gallery Woodberry Forest School, 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Orange. Oil paintings and watercolors by Lena Murray and Juliya Ivanilova. Through October 30. First Fridays opening.

Botanical Fare 421 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Local Parks & Views,” oil works by Julia Kindred. Opens October 4.

The Center at Belvedere 540 Belvedere Blvd. “Capturing the Color,” an art exhibit by The MidAtlantic Pastel Society. Through October 27. First Fridays opening.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd. “Inspirations and Creations” showcases acrylics on canvas by Alison Bachmann and pottery from her son, Chris. Through October 31. Meet the artists at 1pm on October 8.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Fall Magic: Color, Form, Pattern and Design,” features works by multi-media artist Judith N. Ligon and wood works by Floyd “Pete” E. Johnson. During October. First Fridays opening.

The Fralin Museum of Art 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. New exhibitions include “Power Play: Reimagining Representation in Contemporary Photography,” “Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia,” “The Little Museum of Art,” and “Kenji Nakahashi: Weighing Time.”

Guild Gallery Inside Vault Virginia, 300 E. Main St. “The Future and Beyond,” works by Hannah England, Feixue Mei, Raneem Tarfa, and Sha Li in a variety of mediums, including acrylic paint, illustration, collage, and oil paint. Through October 14. First Fridays opening.

Inbio Technologies 700 Harris St., Ste 102. “Art We Love,” a multi-media show from Joan Dreicer, Matalie Deane, and Julia Kindred. Opens October 10.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Bright Lines,” paintings by David Summers. Through October 30. Artist talk at noon, October 16. 

Live Arts 123 E. Water St. “Rare Form,” oil paintings by Kris Bowmaster. Through December 10. First Fridays opening.

The Looking Glass Ix Art Park, 522 Second St. SE. New installations include soft sculpture by Jenny Ollikainen and a mixed-media mural by Sam Ashkani.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Home Waters,” acrylic and ceramics by Susan Willis Brodie. In the First Floor Hallway, “Mindscapes, Landscapes, and Insights” by Lisa Macchi, and “Do the Trees Speak Back to the Wind” by Lindsay Diamond and Jeannine Regan. In the Second Floor Hallway, “Everything Paper,” a McGuffey member group exhibition. In the Associate Gallery, “Harvest.” Show times vary.

McIntire Connaughton Gallery Rouss and Robertson Halls, UVA Grounds. “From Water and Wheels to Abstracted Ideals,” acrylic and oil on canvas by Eric Cross and Stan Sweeney. Through December 9.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “NotAway: Works of Consumption,” by Amanda Nelsen. Through October 28. First Fridays opening.

Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. Kristopher Castle’s “Curriculum Vitae” explores Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia through a series of paintings. Opens October 28. 

PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. The Annual Faculty Exhibition and a retrospective of works from PVCC’s The Fall Line literary magazine. Through November 9.

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “With a Thousand Other Heartbeats,” acrylic paintings by Kathleen Markowitz, and “Slant,” paintings by Don Crow. Through October 9.

Random Row Brewery 608 Preston Ave. “Art for Life,” an exhibit of pastel works by Joan Dreicer supporting the UVA Cancer Center. Through October 31. 

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Mummers,” Megan Marlatt’s series of paintings and large sculptural big head masks inspired by the theme carnival. In the Dové Gallery, “The Ceremony of Innocence,” paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman. First Fridays opening.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 126 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. October 8-9, the 51th Annual Fall Foliage Art Show features painting, printmaking, wood, pottery, glass, jewelry, sculpture, and mixed-media works. Through October 29, in the Cabell/Arehart Invitational Gallery, the annual Anniversary Member’s judged show. 

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “Sage and Fire: An Indigenous Visual Arts Exhibition” showcases cultural and contemporary paintings, photography, and
beadwork by April Branham and Carrie Pruitt, local indigenous artists of the Monacan Indian Nation. Through October 30. First Fridays opening.

Visible Records 1740 Broadway St. “Any Person I Have Robbed Was Judged By Me”, a solo show of photography by Sebastien Boncy. First Fridays opening.