Jose goes to the Long Beach Museum of Art exhibit

Greetings, this is Jose Nava bringing you a small preview of what you’ll find inside the Long Beach Museum of Art’s current exhibition. As you enter the museum, you shall witness how the past comes back to life in radiant colors as Sherrie Wolf resurrects and adds a personal twist to Baroque-era paintings.

The artist who is featured in the exposition is Sherrie Wolf, who is a prominent Oregon-based painter that has made several pieces of art since the late 1970’s.  Her love for art and her admiration for paintings, as well as other artists, are reflected in many of her paintings. Her trademark style is to incorporate still-lives of fruits and flowers into replicas of 19^th-century artwork to convey a mood of surrealism into her art.

Unlike the dark colors that are used in traditional Baroque paintings, Sherrie has added bright colors and more lighting to her paintings, changing the mood on most of her artwork. Another important aspect about her artwork is that a majority of her paintings are actually her own renditions to original pieces of art that she admires. In order to make her paintings different from the original paintings, however, Sherrie adds a still life of items and positions them into her replica to bring the painting into “another world.” According to the exhibition’s brochure, adding a still life into Sherrie’s paintings “challenge the subject of surrealism in painting by posing the question: can a painting ever truly achieve realism, as a painting is a painting, an object, and never the thing it represents.”

The artwork that stood out for me the most is her work titled Self Portrait, in which she seems to be inviting the viewer of the painting to come inside a part of her mind. Sherrie’s Self Portrait is actually her own version of Charles Wilson Peale’s The Artist in his Museum from 1822. In the original painting, Peale lifts a velvet drape to reveal an exhibition hall with shelves of stuffed birds, museum visitors, and the remains of old specimens such as the jaws and bones of a mastodon. Sherrie, however, placed herself inside the painting as she reveals a museum that shows objects and pieces of art that represent parts of herself. For example, Sherrie painted the skull of a steer and a pink flower blossom, which is an reference to her admiration for Georgia O'Keefe. Another example is a reference of Marie-Denise Villers' painting Charlotte du Val d'Ognes, which references the fact that Wolf herself duplicates paintings. These and many other references to already-existing pieces of art is something that appealed to me due to the personal meaning that each work of art inside the painting have for the painter herself.

Sherrie’s work answered one of the questions I’ve been holding in my mind for quite some time: is there anyone in the 21^st century that has created realistic paintings like the ones from several centuries ago? I am very impressed to know that there are people who can replicate the realistic art style from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. Somehow people have been isolating themselves from realistic art styles in the 20^th century. Although the new styles of art have been quite revolutionary and have placed themselves as an integral part of art history, I’ve felt that people no longer cared about the realistic styles of centuries gone by. Sherrie not only resurrected Baroque art, in my opinion, but gave it the life and the brightness it really deserves.