Séraphine Pick
Author: Chloe Hurst Date Published: 29.11.22
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Born in 1964 in Kawakawa, Bay of Islands, Séraphine Pick graduated from the University of Canterbury in 1987 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Pick then took up a Diploma of Teaching from Christchurch College of Education in 1991. 3 years later, Séraphine Pick is accepting the Olivia Spencer-Bower Foundation Art Award. She has had her work in two significant galleries, one by Christchurch Art Gallery in 2009, and the other by The Dowse Art Museum in 2015.
At the present time, Pick lives in Wellington, and continues to make art.
What inspired them to paint?
Séraphine Pick works with figments of memory and paints human bodies as an embodiment of consciousness. Recently, Pick has started branching into digital ways of creating her work. She says it's been helpful to ‘decode aspects of universal human experience.’ The cultural influence of the internet was the main inspiration for her “White Noise” Exhibit in 2015. Pick says that it was the consuming of media, the captivation of celebrities, and a plethora of selfies - all for the pursuit of happiness. This is what inspired her to make this whole gallery.
Newer work that she has made has become significantly smaller in size, and much more impressionistic, even abstract. Her new inspiration is the emphasis of human mark-making through painting.
Overall, the main theme Pick enjoys to explore is what it really means to be a human, especially in this day and age with technology, which can easily distort our perception of reality. Séraphine Pick intentionally touches on how humans lose their sense of connection to the body when absorbing things on the internet. Pick states that your brain will perceive this experience in a peculiar way, and that is what she wanted to paint.
Sometimes pick will use her childhood as a unique approach to her artwork, utilizing what she has, and growing up in the 1970s. She also converys themes through her life experience of being a mother in the twenty-first century. Whether the subjects in her paintings are family members, strangers, or friends, Picks paintings are rarely basic representations of someone's identity. Instead, Seraphine Pick frequently likes to conceal fundamental parts of a human portrait. I believe this is the heart of Picks' work; she allows the mystery to act as a beginning to your own thoughts and allows you to dive deeper into the meanings. She does this often by making her subjects turn away, wear masks, sunglasses, or even hats. Sometimes she even avoids the common composition of the art model staring straight at the viewer.
Pick uses many forms as references for her work: photographs, books, magazines, and occasionally altered and distorted images of herself. Seraphine's older work is shown to have strong techniques related to imagery and styles of the Medieval period, especially gothic symbols. Artworks associated with this theme that Pick has made are reported to look like dreamscapes, where important objects of Seraphine's life are floating in the air. Some of these include: beds, dresses, pincushions and colanders.
The transition into a newer painting style was due to a trip to Europe she had. Here, she was enamored by the European art history. As soon as she returned to New Zealand, she started painting with warmer, saturated colours like greens, blues, pinks, and browns in order to traverse a new enjoyment of art. Finally, Seraphine Picks art has once again cultivated into a combination of these two art tactics. She began to intertwine painting surfaces which are flat with metaphorical components. These components are usually very close to the foreground.
One technique Pick continuously used throughout all of the stages in her art journey would be the scratching of spidery lines. These are skillfully engraved into the canvas which enhance the dreamy ambiance.
What makes them tick?
In an Interview, Pick states the stress of finances as a full-time artist. She conveys how she feels like the more she produces, the more she must pay monetarily. In this statement, she refers to taxes, gallery commissions, and the price of the media she works with.
Another thing which makes Seraphine Pick tick would be art commentators. She sometimes becomes frustrated by their strong opinions for the ‘right way to look at art’ because Pick wants the viewer to come to their own conclusions and allow their imagination to find their meaning. When a commentator shows off what they see, it cuts off the deeper meaning that you the viewer can find, in your own mind. Art, in its very nature, is subjective.
Easy Living II
To me, Picks piece represents the stimulation of being in nature and how it creates utter tranquillity. This artwork communicates, on a surface level, green lush vegetation of flowers in the midground and foreground. These flowers and grass turn into paint drips at the bottom of the canvas, which remind me of the ink lines made in Bill Hammonds piece, “The fall of Icarus.”
Here in Picks work, a person stands, looking up with arms wide, holding a light source. The person is wearing fairly average clothing, yet it's contrasted with the intricate beaded jewellery hanging from their neck. They also have red fabric tied around their arms and wrist. In the background, we see a stripe of blue, that I assume to be a river. There is a mystery to what is behind the person, as the canvas is “blank”, with pale yellow and brown lashes of colour. I think there is great beauty in this impressionistic background where every element seems to blend together with strong and muted colours dancing on the canvas. Perhaps this figure is praising a religious god or dancing.
The atmosphere produced by this painting is soft and blurry: yellows mixing with blues mixing with greens. Just like Hammonds vertical lines, this painting conveys lines dripping out of reality.
The name of the artwork is very important when it comes to analysing this painting. There is another painting in this ‘Easy Living’ mini-series. It is also titled “Easy Living II” yet it's obviously a very different painting. This one has much more information given to the viewer, with a more worked in the background, as well as more vibrant flowers. In this one, trees are covering the river, and the light source which the person holds is much more visible.
The first painting in this series, called “Easy Living” is also painted by Seraphine Pick. In this one, we see a not very dressed woman extending her hands to the sky. The colours and mood that this painting expresses is extremely different from the other two.
Thanks for reading my research!
References
Viva: Artist Seraphine Pick on Her Latest Solo Exhibition https://www.viva.co.nz/article/culture-travel/artist-seraphine-pick-on-her-latest-solo-exhibition/
Michaellet: Seraphine Pick https://michaellett.com/artist/seraphine-pick/ and https://michaellett.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2018-SP-MLG-PDF.pdf
Christchurch Art gallery https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/bulletin/157/seraphine-pick-assumed-identities and https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/seraphine-pick
Dowse: Seraphine pick https://dowse.org.nz/exhibitions/detail/seraphine-pick
Ocula https://ocula.com/artists/seraphine-pick/
NMG https://www.nadenemilnegallery.com/artists/seraphine-pick
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