RAM Talks Art: Renaissance Woman—Vera Klement featured in new RAM exhibition

By Patty Rhea, Curator, Rockford Art Museum


Like her sumptuous paintings, Vera Klement is composed of many fine, deliberate layers. One of Chicago's most distinguished painters, Klement is a true Renaissance Woman. She is as well versed in literature, poetry and music as she is in the visual arts. Influenced by the compositions of Beethoven and Bach, as well as the written works of Kafka, James and Proust, Vera marries the principles of various art forms to her paintings. The Rockford Art Museum (RAM) retrospective Vera Klement: Paint Into Icon celebrates the life work of this creative soul (Oct. 17, 2008 to Jan. 4, 2009).

Klement's evocative paintings are not just about what is on the canvas but also what is not. Nicely balanced, large-scale abstract work on signature white ground is commonly paired with metaphoric objects; Klement often uses a vessel to suggest the female form and a tree trunk to represent the male. Typically displayed in diptych form, the two passages often yield a poetic third. Vera innately understands the power of repetition, scale, layered paint and radiant color.

Figurative elements are often built up with layered paint creating the illusion of mass and weight in an almost sculptural way. Sometimes elements of drawing or collage are brought into the painting, creating additional depth. Compositions also display gestural elements such as areas where paint is sometimes “thrown.”

Klement has spent more than 50 years making art. Every inch of her Printer's Row Studio has a transcendental feel and is imbued with meaning, much like the art created there. Her love of paint is astounding: vibrant layered colors cover her workbench, echoing the gestural movement of Abstract Expressionism.

An excerpt from Vera Klement's memoir Blunt Edge perhaps best describes her influences and life beautifully:

“I was born in a small town that was known for its beauty and moderate climate, a renowned resort on the Baltic Sea. It was part of the Free City of Danzig, an independent German Hanseatic city/state, that is now—Gdansk, Poland. …

“From the beginning I experienced a sense of duality: the radiant light and rhythmic pounding of the Sea, and there, rising behind it, the dark forest that held in its silence the northern European legends of evil spirits: witches, erlkings and poison toadstools. Light and dark—good and evil – life and death—that juxtaposition that eventually became the underpinning of my painting. …

“I might add another duality, an important one, the duality of language: the official German spoken in the town, that was my first language – and the Russian that my parents spoke. …When the Nazis instituted their rule (1933) and the terrors began, I learned about that dark side. … We managed to escape one month after Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) and fled to New York. … We arrived in 1938, at Christmastime. … The act of painting is celebratory … and when I say ‘It is about being alive,' that, of course, means it is about death as well. …

“My early experience—indeed, my entire life—is the lining of my intentions, an ever-present something glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. … My graduate school was not a building. Rather, it was a place and a time—the streets of New York in the early fifties. … By 1958, I had the crucial insight that this way of painting (Abstract Expressionism), this action of spontaneous marks in the arena of the space, was random and unfocused. …

“I had a huge appetite for looking at the world and wanted to describe the essence of that experience—the charged presence of objects. The way in which a tree almost hums its being. … I had a great longing to define the body. Not the flattened and fractured figure of Modernism, but the body in its fullness and weight. … I dreamed of a yet-unknown figure that inhabits a luminous space. … I wanted to move forward, to find a new way to make the figure from the kind of painting that the Abstract Expressionists had developed.

“To make the figure out of the paint itself.”

And paint Vera Klement does. Like her chosen words, her paintings speak volumes. Paint Into Icon is a marriage of paint and color. Most of all, it is a celebration of the creative spirit of a gifted artist.

Contact Rockford Art Museum Curator Patty Rhea at prhea@rockfordartmuseum.org.

from the Oct. 22-28, 2008, issue

 

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