Audrey Flack, Pioneer of Photorealism

Audrey Flack, Pioneer of Photorealism Audrey Flack, born May 30, 1931, is an American artist. Her work, primarily painting and sculpture, has placed her at the forefront of pop art and photorealism. Fast Facts: Audrey Flack Full Name:  Audrey L. FlackOccupation: ArtistKnown For: Pioneering the photorealist genre of art, particularly with portrayals of women, everyday objects, and moments in relatively recent history.Born: May 30, 1931 in New York CityNotable Works:  Kennedy Motorcade (1964), Marilyn (Vanitas) (1977), World War II (Vanitas) (1978) Early Life and Education Flack was born in New York City in 1931, in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. As a teenager, she attended a specialized arts public institution, the High School of Music and Art. Her formal art education began in 1948, when she began her studies at New York’s Cooper Union. Flack remained there until 1951 and was then recruited to Yale, largely thanks to the influence of German-American artist Josef Albers (who was then in charge of Yale’s art department). While at Yale, Flack continued developing her own style while being influenced by her teachers and mentors. In particular, her early work demonstrated an Abstract Expressionist style in the vein of Albers’ work. Flack graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1952. The following year, she returned to New York and studied art history for a year at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Abstract to Realism At first, Flack’s work in the 1950s was a clear offshoot of her training with abstract expressionists. She also embraced â€Å"kitschiness† in a self-aware, ironic way. However, as time went on, she began to feel that the abstract expressionist style she was utilizing was not achieving what she felt was an important goal: communicating with audiences. Because of this desire to create art that was clearer to viewers, Flack began moving towards realism. Portrait of artist Audrey Flack sits next to a painting of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy riding in the back of a limousine on the day he was assassinated.   Nancy R. Schiff / Getty Images She enrolled in the Art Students League (ASL), where she studied anatomy under the tutelage of Robert Beverly Hale, and began finding inspiration in artists from past eras rather than more recent movements. Her work began to be categorized in the â€Å"New Realism† movement, and, eventually, shifted all the way into photorealism, in which an artist attempts to reproduce a photographed image as realistically as possible in a different medium. Flack was one of the first students at the ASL to fully embrace photorealism and use photographs as reference for her work. Photorealism, in many ways, is a sister genre to pop art: depicting ordinary, mundane items, often as still-lifes that imitate the realism of photography as closely as possible. In 1966, Flack became the first photorealist painter to have work in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art.   Increased Influence In some cases, Flack’s work moved past the typical still life paintings and depicted historical events. One of her most famous works is Kennedy Motorcade, November 22, 1963, which, as its title suggests, depicts a scene from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Her historical paintings, including her Vanitas works, often featured some kind of socio-political commentary. Her still life paintings often did as well; for instance, her paintings of female-coded items such as makeup and perfume bottles tended to involve some commentary on gender roles and constructs. Portrait of gallery owner Louis Meisel and artist Audrey Flack and her hyper-realist painting of Marilyn Monroe, New York, New York, March 10, 1978. Allan Tannenbaum / Getty Images In the early 1970s, Flack developed a new technique for her paintings. Instead of just using a photograph as a reference, she actually projected it as a slide onto the canvas, then developed an airbrushing technique to create the layers of paint. The 1970s also saw Flack paint her Vanitas series, which depicted everything from jewelry to scenes of WWII concentration camps. By the 1980s, however, Flack had switched her primary medium from painting to sculpture. She is entirely self-taught in sculpture, as opposed to her significant formal training in painting. There are also other significant differences in her sculptural works versus her paintings. For instance, where her paintings focused on ordinary objects or historical scenes, her sculptures tend to depict religious and mythological subjects. For the most part, women are depicted in her sculptures, representing somewhat idealized but imperfect and diverse variations on the female form and femininity itself. Contemporary Work In the 1990s and 2000s, Flack had a fair amount of work commissioned. At one point, she was commissioned to create a statue of Catherine of Braganza, the British queen after whom the New York City borough of Queens was named; the project met with several objections and was never completed. More recently, her statues Recording Angel  and  Colossal Head of Daphne  (both completed between 2006 and 2008) were commissioned by and installed in Nashville, Tennessee. Audrey Flacks Recording Angel statue stands outside the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, Tennessee.   Raymond Boyd / Getty Images In more recent years, Flack has returned to her roots. Finding the photorealist movement rather â€Å"restricting,† she shifted back to Baroque influences. She wrote a book in 1986, collecting her thoughts on art and being an artist. Flack has also taught and lectured both in America and abroad. Currently, she is an honorary professor at George Washington University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is based out of New York, where she splits her time between New York City and Long Island. Sources Blumberg, Naomi and Ida Yalzadeh. â€Å"Audrey Flack: American Painter and Sculptor.† Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Audrey-Flack.Flack, Audrey.  Art Soul: Notes on Creating, New York, Dutton, 1986.Morgan, Robert C. â€Å"Audrey Flack and the Revolution of Still Life Painting.† The Brooklyn Rail, 5 Nov. 2010, https://brooklynrail.org/2010/11/artseen/audrey-flack-and-the-revolution-of-still-life-painting.

Drilling Into Faults

Drilling Into Faults Geologists are daring to go where they once could only dream of going- right to the places where earthquakes actually happen. Three projects have taken us into the seismogenic zone. As one report put it, projects like these put us at the precipice of quantum advances in the science of earthquake hazards. Drilling the San Andreas Fault at Depth The first of these drilling projects made a borehole next to the San Andreas fault near Parkfield, California, at a depth of about 3 kilometers. The project is called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth or SAFOD, and its part of the much larger research effort EarthScope. Drilling began in 2004 with a vertical hole going down 1500 meters then curving toward the fault zone. The 2005 work season extended this slanting hole all the way across the fault, and was followed by two years of monitoring. In 2007 drillers made four separate side holes, all on the near side of the fault, that are equipped with all kinds of sensors. The chemistry of fluids, microearthquakes, temperatures and more are being recorded for the next 20 years. While drilling these side holes, core samples of intact rock were taken that cross the active fault zone giving tantalizing evidence of the processes there. Scientists kept up a website with daily bulletins,  and if you read it youll see some of the difficulties of this kind of work. SAFOD was carefully placed at an underground location where regular sets of small earthquakes have been happening. Just like the last 20 years of earthquake research at Parkfield, SAFOD is aimed at a part of the San Andreas fault zone where the geology seems to be simpler and the faults behavior more manageable than elsewhere. Indeed, the whole fault is considered to be easier to study than most because it has a simple strike-slip structure with a shallow bottom, at about 20 km depth. As faults go, it is a rather straight and narrow ribbon of activity with well-mapped rocks on either side. Even so, detailed maps of the surface show a tangle of related faults. The mapped rocks include tectonic splinters that have been swapped back and forth across the fault during its hundreds of kilometers of offset. The patterns of earthquakes at Parkfield have not been as regular or simple as geologists had hoped, either; nevertheless SAFOD is our best look so far at the cradle of earthquakes. The Nankai Trough Subduction Zone In a global sense the San Andreas fault, even as long and active as it is, is not the most significant type of seismic zone. Subduction zones take that prize for three reasons:    They are responsible for all the largest, magnitude 8 and 9 earthquakes we have recorded, such as the Sumatra quake of December 2004 and the Japan earthquake of March 2011.Because they are always under the ocean, subduction-zone earthquakes tend to trigger tsunamis.Subduction zones are where lithospheric plates move toward and underneath other plates, on their way into the mantle where they give rise to most of the worlds volcanoes. So there are compelling reasons to learn more about these faults (plus many more scientific reasons), and drilling into one is just within the state of the art. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Project is doing that with a new state-of-the-art drillship off the coast of Japan. The Seismogenic Zone Experiment, or SEIZE, is a three-phase program that will measure the inputs and outputs of the subduction zone where the Philippine plate meets Japan in the Nankai Trough. This is a shallower trench than most subduction zones, making it easier for drilling. The Japanese have a long and accurate history of earthquakes on this subduction zone, and the site is only a days ship travel away from land. Even so, in the difficult conditions foreseen the drilling will require a riser- an outer pipe from the ship to the sea floor- to prevent blowouts and so that the effort can proceed using drilling mud instead of seawater, as previous drilling has used. The Japanese have built a brand-new drillship, Chikyu (Earth) that can do the job, reaching 6 kilometers below the sea floor. One question the project will seek to answer is what physical changes accompany the earthquake cycle on subduction faults. Another is what happens in the shallow region where soft sediment fades into brittle rock, the boundary between soft deformation and seismic disruption. There are places on land where this part of subduction zones is exposed to geologists, so results from the Nankai Trough will be very interesting. Drilling began in 2007.   Drilling New Zealands Alpine Fault The Alpine fault, on New Zealands South Island, is a large oblique-thrust fault that causes magnitude 7.9 earthquakes every few centuries. One interesting feature of the fault is that vigorous uplift and erosion have beautifully exposed a thick cross-section of the crust that provides fresh samples of the deep fault surface. The Deep Fault Drilling Project, a collaboration of New Zealand and European institutions, is punching cores across the Alpine fault by drilling straight down. The first part of the project succeeded in penetrating and coring the fault twice just 150 meters below the ground in January 2011 then instrumenting the holes. A deeper hole is planned near the Whataroa River in 2014 that will go down 1500 meters. A public wiki serves past and ongoing data from the project.