Artwork

Source II

Artist/Creator
Date: 1992
ID #: BG6430

Physical Description

Medium: wood block
Support: paper
Dimensions
Object Description: This print by Renée Van Halm considers still life and how decorative images are generated by looking at forms from nature. This work takes it imagery from an historic woodcut. Van Halm writes that "Abe Rogatnick gave me a copy of the source image not long after I gave him
my print. Another of the prints has one of the signatures of Mary Cassatt, which is related to my work Verification, held by the National Gallery of Canada. The third print has a decorative floral pattern next to a plywood pattern, the ubiquitous modern pattern of twentieth-century architecture.”

Although not technically part of the series, Source II relates to Van Halm's Life of the Artist (1989-92), which was intended to “comment on the attendant structures surrounding art, including the life of the artist, for instance the signature and the studio. A cult has grown up around the lives of living as well as dead artists, the artist often championed as celebrity, as hero. This work comments on how these all have and continue to be used by the historian, the patron and the viewer to endow works of art with meaning and allow them to be better understood and appreciated and how artists themselves contribute to the creation of this myth.” (Renée Van Halm).

History

Collection: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Credit Line: Gift of Scott Watson, from the collection of Alvin Balkind and Abraham Rogatnick, 2024
Related Exhibitions: –

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