TitleVelsuna II
Artist
Deborah W. Remington
(American, 1935 - 2010)
Date1973
MediumColor lithograph on white Copperplate Deluxe paper
DimensionsSheet size: 27 15/16 × 21 1/4 in.
Image size: 27 15/16 × 21 1/4 in.
Other (Backing board): 35 1/4 × 28 1/4 in.
Edition9/12
SignedSigned in graphite at BR: "© Remington '73".
MarkingsTamarind blindstamp at BL, printer's blindstamp at BRC.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, December 15, 1999
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1999.134
Label TextDeborah Remington was at the center of the Beat movement in 1950s San Francisco. She was a co-founder of the Six Gallery, an artists' collective that soon became an important venue for Beat music, film, poetry, and art. Enrolling at the progressive California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1949, she studied with Elmer Bischoff, NA, Ed Corbett, David Park, Hassell Smith, and Clyfford Still, graduating in 1955. She subsequently traveled in Southeast Asia and India, moving to New York in 1965, and also living for a short time in Paris. Remington had been partially influenced by the structural imagery in Franz Kline's paintings, and in the early 1960s while painting in a gestural, Abstract Expressionist style, her work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. By the late 1960s when she was exhibiting at the Bykert Gallery, New York, and Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris, her style had shifted to precisely rendered, centralized forms. The artist's most recent work combines her emblematic, nested shapes of the 1960s and 70s with the Expressionist style and all-over compositions of her work from the 1980s."Velsuna II" is typical of the artist's imagery of the 1970s: a nearly symmetrical, shield-like form is centered against an empty background, while a central area of gray suggests a convex mirror or other reflective surface. A blue, wing-like shape within seems to reflect an object or creature flying off to the right. The uneven edges of the form and the rich texture of the ink prevent the motif from becoming too mechanical. The shapes in Remington's work have been compared to Japanese calligraphy, an appropriate comparison as the artist spent the year 1958-59 studying contemporary and traditional calligraphy in Japan. The form in "Velsuna II," however, relates more closely to the shape of the inkstone used in preparing the ink for calligraphy. The word Velsuna refers to an ancient Etruscan city and was chosen by the artist for its lack of associations, while the dignified sound of the name she felt suited this image.
Remington has described her work as dealing with "the paradoxes of visual perception. . . . The images are couched in paradoxical terms and must challenge the mind's eye, must invoke opposites and hold them in tension." Here the color gradations evoke a mysterious kind of light: the background fades from dark at the top to light at the bottom, while the center shape paradoxically has a reversed gradation. These gradations were achieved through a complex printing process involving twelve colors and five runs through the press, a challenge Remington tackled with collaborating printer Richard Newlin. The result is a print in which the motifs common in Remington's painted work are condensed into a simplified form that alludes to outside associations yet remains mysterious.
