Following a distinguished academic career (she is Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton University), Nell Painter returned to school and began a second career as an artist. “I came to the Brodsky Center wanting to do a woodcut because I like that it retains traces of the process, the marks of an effort that speaks volumes visually, but also in terms of art history, because woodblock has been so influential. Wise Woman Disappears is my very first woodcut. It comes from my drawing of a photograph of me taken by Joanna Morrissey at the MacDowell Colony at the end of 2016. Before I left Princeton, I had started making art, but I did not have any experience with dark-skinned models. Representing dark skin is different from dealing with light skin, largely in terms of its reflectiveness and rendering features. So, I used the figure closest to me, always at hand—me. I did not have to worry about whether I would make myself too cute or too ugly. I was just a motif. What I was self-consciously doing, instead, was experimenting with images and processes, strategies of rendering a figurative image. The background in Wise Woman Disappears is from a detail of a Nigerian cloth I brought back in the 1960s that I love. It’s abstract, but clearly evokes some other culture, place, and time.”
Wise Woman Disappears
