Yelena Kimelblat: Burlap Collection
Yelena Kimelblat’s recent offering of more than twenty paintings in her newly evolved, visually striking “Burlap Collection” represents a personal breakthrough for her as an artist. The paintings are, for this self-taught Ukrainian-American artist, an exquisite series of images, unified by the artist’s idiosyncratic yet evocative imagery. Yelena’s images explore the nuances of feminine subjectivity in a way that transcends historical moments to reveal a foundational, intimate embodied truth.
First Impressions
The scope and variety of Yelena’s work is most impressive. The paintings are emphatically, even boldly expressionistic. Indeed, each of Yelena’s paintings exerts its own special gravity. Yes, as with the collected works of any artist, there are similarities that link her paintings, but unlike other artists who develop a certain technical sameness in style, Yelena seems determined to address each painting in its own unique terms of design, palate, and emotion. Each painting differs significantly, even dramatically from the others, so that it draws the eye into its own, usually very private storyworld. Despite some obvious similarities in Yelena’s image vocabulary, her enunciation of each painting is distinct, and the emotional energy of each has its own fresh and very powerful singularity.
Theme, Style, Examples
Each painting features a formally balanced, expressionistic female form as its subject, and each is rendered in acrylic paint on half of a burlap’s coffee sack---a gunny sack---with only partially finished edges and frequently showing the commercial sack printing beneath the painted image. The painted design is “expressionistic” to the degree that the woman-subject is not intended to be naturalistic or detailed, but she represents an emotional quantity: a simplified female, her image embodying an intimate moment.
The designs are balanced, beautiful, even archetypal (more on this in a moment). Yelena’s palate explores the emotional potentials of skin and hair colors rather than naturally representing color. We easily recognize topic ideas organizing Yelena’s design categories: the woman in isolation; the woman facing obstruction, restraint, or confinement; the mother/child dyad; and of course, the nude. While the paintings are clearly from the same painter, yet each is an image from its own palate, its own sensibility, its own dream.
Individual Examples, Four Paintings
Perhaps the most provocative painting is “Unfinished Work” which is an ironic presentation of a sexually powerful “goddess image” leaning against a barrier---a bed frame?--- in what might be exhaustion. The image is rendered mostly in shades of grey-white that only incompletely covers the commercial lettering of the burlap bag surface. The limited palate of whites, greys, black and brown and the incomplete definition of image make her seem to be in a fog of exhaustion. The commercial printing showing through suggests a degree of object or commodity value as opposed to intrinsic value. Both bag and goddess appear frayed, yet they make a formally complete composition. Yelena’s emotional implication is that being alive is an ongoing experience of barriers, background noise, and always already unfinished business: a woman’s work, her sex, mothering, housekeeping, can feel like a fog of always more to do.
“Turquoise Nude” is another painting in which the raw burlap is incorporated into the design, but in this painting, although the underlayment for the paint, the almost raw burlap is shaped to represent the outward protuberances of the nude figure: her breasts, belly, and thighs. This clever redefining of the unpainted space acts like a negative space: an imaginary invitation for the viewer rather than a pronouncement by the painter. What is intentional image and what is the work of the viewer's Gestalt? The form is typical of Yelena’s women: the nude has a specific hair style and a zaftig or Rubenesque rotundity connoting sexuality, even fertility. Her hands and feet are suggested rather than fully articulated, while her pose is rhythmic rather than exactly motivated by gravity. The gorgeous and eye catching turquoise is surprisingly offset by a band of red, set on a field of black. The play of color contrasts makes the nude positively glow with feminine power even as the raw burlap shows through her.
“Labor Pain” depicts a faceless woman experiencing labor contractions, curled around the effort of her womb the moment before birth. The shape of her body and her face protected by arms suggest both the fearsome agony of the moment and the universality of the birth experience. It is perhaps her most intimate, most feminine depiction. Yelena’s strategy of layering her paint---white on burlap, black on white, flesh on black---give a dimensional depth to the figure, we look over her shoulder as if she is bending away from us in privacy. Adding to this sense of isolation is the tiny puddle of red beneath her; blood is the toll of birth, of fertility, of the purest creative force. Given these emotional implications, however, it might be easy to miss the color of this mother’s flesh: this image of skin is possibly the most elaborated surface in Yelena’s work; an amazing blend of color to give an authentic and unusual representation of flesh, warm, yielding, vulnerable… alive.
“Together” is one of Yelena’s most compositionally subtle creations. It seems to be a depiction of a mother and two children curled together in a secure location. But even this much is a likely guess. What we’re really looking at is a study of oval and curvilinear abstract shapes---a mother and children’s heads in what seems to be a protected space created by… vegetation? A cave? Seen through an oval aperture? There’s no definitive answer, just the calm invitation of the formally beautiful design. But what we must also notice is how Yelena has painted her design in concert with the swirling of the weave of the burlap. The subtle pattern that her colors respond to acts like an energy field, a protective force, giving the abstract image a harmonic completion, and again, activating the power of the woven fabric as a kind of feminine signifier, a root power.
A Woman’s Figure
Despite Yelena’s design originality and thematic specificity, still, her figures are in an ancient lineage. We recognize motifs from beyond antiquity: Madonna and Child is one tradition. The Odalisque another. “The Sleeping Woman” archetype is familiar from ancient Malta to Picasso. Most significantly, we recognize Venus from the Paleolithic to Renaissance to the contemporary. And it’s possibly the Paleolithic Venus archetype that is the most resonant connector to Yelena’s vision.
Venus figurines, 3 to 15 inches in size, carved from tusk, horn, stone, and even fired ceramic are, aside from stone tools, among the very first shaped human artifacts to have been discovered. They are the first evidence we have of human creations that were art objects, not pragmatic tools. These tiny human statues are truly signal discoveries. We have found more than forty Venuses, dating from 40,000 to 11,000 BCE, and most amazing is their exact similarities to each other across tens of thousands of years and at sites from Morocco to Siberia. Like Yelena’s women, the Venus figurines are sexually forthright, wide at hips and breasts, with articulated hair, but often without arms or feet or precise facial features. Their bodies are obviously maternal, and they are prototype versions of fertility goddesses appearing in later cultures ranging from Bronze Age Europe, through Mesopotamia, Africa, and Asia.
Oh and also, there are no similar male figurines. These earliest human images created by humans of the Upper Paleolithic (the Late Stone Age) were exclusively in the female form. The exact meaning of this female exclusivity is impossible to determine, but it implies a religious importance, possibly a fertility cult, matriarchal power, the origins of spirit in the womb? We can’t know. We do know that these small figurines were of tribal and seemingly universal human importance. Carefully crafted, and designed to be portable, they were like the gods of ancient pantheistic texts and the Old Testament in which deities had mythic power originations and were carried for migrations and during warfare to exert totemistic power.
Yelena’s new work is a rediscovery of this archetypal form. She is not overtly referring to the Stone Age cult, however; her Venuses are a reimagining of the prototypical woman figure--- woman as vulnerable, sexual, fertile, volatile, venerated. While each painting uses shape and color to suggest an intimate moment, yet, like the Paleolithic images forever withholding determinate meaning, each painting vibrates at the level of emotional suggestion, not ideological instruction.
Burlap, the Foundation Signifier
Like a knight’s move in chess, Yelena’s choice of burlap bags as her painting surface goes over and around the Western tradition of the artist’s canvas as the painter’s foundational medium. Yelena’s use of unstructured and rough burlap amounts to a symbolic statement about how art is valued yet removed from the human experience. The burlap is not just a backing but represents a backstory in Yelena’s disruptive project to introduce a deeper experiential implication to her artistic imagery.
Artist’s canvas has been, since 15th Century Venice, an unappreciated lingua franca of painted imagery. The framed canvas has been the invisible, yet indispensable bearer of signification, foundational to the painting system of art and art value. And it is a peculiarly masculine discourse system: male artists, male dealers and purchasers, and male sailors have dominated the canvas-centric mode of production.
History: In the Fourteenth Century, Venetian artists and art dealers, in order to make paintings more commercial, promoted stretched cotton duck---sailcloth---to replace wood as an oil paint surface. Venice had abundant high quality canvas to support their maritime empire and were sophisticated traders. Canvas paintings were more portable, durable, and a finer surface for the painter to work. Painters could work faster and better, and lightweight canvases could be more easily displayed, more efficiently stored and transported, even reused if a painting didn’t sell.
However, each on its identically stretched frame, every canvas was exactly like every other canvas: an invisible bearer of the image, embodying the pretense that the image was a mystical, even serene isolate of information. Aesthetic value disguising the labor of the mode of production. Historically then, paintings have existed like bills of currency, in a standardized form, their value determined by the differences only in the surface design play.
But the choice of the unfinished and unsupported burlap sack as the paint backing invokes a whole new dimension of signification and evaluation. The painted image is still visible, still primary, but the mode of production is not disguised or effaced but is, indeed, incorporated as aesthetic power of the whole.
The actualities of the burlap bag as an already-used material signifier, as a defined meaning before the painting, contribute to the play of signification we use to make meaning of the work. Burlap makes no secret of its mercantile efficiencies. The bag held and transported coffee, harvested in the developing world, delivered to the developed a transport from poverty to wealth. The roughness of the burlap fabric presents a textured surface, taking the paint but not entirely effaced by the paint. Unlike anonymous canvas which is designed to disappear behind the image, the Burlap Collection paintings are not floating signifiers disconnected from the world, but their emotional themes are grounded in history---the history of the sackcloth, the coffee it carried, the markets it served, the laborers who touched it, all of which are present in the gestalt of the painted effort.
Consider:
Biblically, and in other religious traditions, burlap sackcloth was worn as a penance, in mourning, as a sign of humility, an antidote to pride.
A fabric like burlap made from weaving crushed jute or hemp fibers was the primitive predecessor to all other woven materials. The oldest example of burlap dated from a Mesopotamian Iron Age tomb so dry the fibres didn’t rot for tens of thousands of years.
Otzi the Copper Age Alpine mummy had sandals held on by burlap braiding.
In several of Yelena’s paintings, the commercial printing shows up under the paint: labor and survival necessarily precede artistic images.
The reinforcing colored stitching on some bags survives at the borders of her paintings acting as both framing detail and an opportunistic incorporation of old with new purpose, the essential labor precedent to the artistic painting process.
The edges of Yelena’s paintings are frayed, not neatly squared off, but actual captures of ancient fiber-flattening and weaving of grasses, not accidentally invoking braided hair…
The Venus of Willendorf (30,000 BCE) seems to have braided hair.
- Patrick McCord, PhD