Elaine Reichek: "Paint Me a Cavernous Waste Essay

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Elaine Reichek: "Paint Me a Cavernous Waste Shore"

The artist Elaine Reichek's works can be best described as a combination of traditional crafts and pastiche. Reichek has, throughout her existence as an artist, been intent upon challenging conventional notions of what constitutes a fine art. Her 2009-2010 tapestry "Paint Me a Cavernous Waste Shore" draws from Greek mythology, Renaissance art, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. "One thing I'm very much worried about is the exclusion of the female artist, and the embrace of 'craft,'" Reichek has said (Lichtenstein 2012). Reichek notes that embroidery was the art of the upper class woman, yet it was also devalued because it was feminine -- and the women that produced it were not professionally trained like painters. "There's a connection between the warm and fuzzy image of knitting and the nostalgia associated with vintage photographs. There's a lot of baggage tied to all these issues," she says, and the use of knitting and embroidery in her own work is not intended to resolve them, but merely provoke thought about the contradictory images of feminine power in our culture (Lichtenstein 2012).

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Critics have often struggled to categorize her work: "Reichek draws on the tradition of embroidered samplers to create conceptual, word-based art" ("Elaine Reichek," MoMa, 2010.). The artist has explained her "artmaking very much as Penelope described weaving her tapestry: as a constant process of making and remaking, beginning and beginning again" (Lichtenstein 2012). Reichek sees her own work as a 'beginning again' of our understanding of the meaning of sewing, weaving, tapestry, and its feminine associations. Reichek embraced handicrafts to translate them through modern eyes.

On one level, "Paint Me a Cavernous Waste Shore" seems to function in a very literal fashion. It depicts a cavernous mouth near a body of water, and the quotation from T.S. Eliot's poem that it evokes is beneath it, on its blue border. The representational figure of the tapestry is that of Titan's painting Bacchus and Ariadne, which depicts Ariadne: "Seated on a rock, she is looking at her sister Phaedra...Ariadne was taken away from Theseus by Dionysus, who sailed against him with superior forces, and either fell in….....

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