It’s Day 129 and I am excited to do today’s painting and you’ll see why very shortly!  I’m also very excited to try and just relax and not run around doing errands or chores and especially not creating anxiety for myself.  This week has been difficult in that aspect.  It could’ve been a hormonal thing, but I don’t know.  Anyways, it’s a beautiful day and join me in celebrating wonderful outsider artist Aurie Ramirez!  It was difficult to find lots of info on her, but here it is!  I was excited to learn that she is from my area. 🙂

(From www.creativegrowth.org)

Aurie Ramirez’s sophisticated, delicately rendered watercolor and ink compositions create an ever-expanding fantasy world where fragments of 18th century dandyism, neo-Victorian decorum, psychedelia, Venetian masquerade, Glam Rock sex and Punk fetishism are repeated and transformed. Aurie’s work has been inspired by her interest in the Adams Family, and the rock band Kiss. Most recently Aurie has exhibited her work in shows at White Columns and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, ABCD in Paris, and Collection l’Art Brut, Lausanne.

Born 1962, Philippines.

(Below is from www.whitecolumns.org)

Since the early 1980s, Ramirez has worked at the Creative Growth Art Center in

Oakland, CA. Creative Growth is a world-renowned workshop and art studio for adult artists with mental and developmental disabilities. (Aurie has a condition that shares many characteristics with autism).

 

Since 2005 White Columns has collaborated on a series of exhibitions by artists affiliated with Creative Growth, including solo exhibitions by Ramirez, William Scott, Dan Miller, Judith Scott, and David Albertsen. Additionally we have shown work by these and other Creative Growth-affiliated artists in exhibitions and projects in Philadelphia, Miami, Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, Berlin, and at other venues in New York.

For her current exhibition Ramirez is presenting a discrete group of watercolor on paper works from c. 2001 that mostly focus on food stuffs and their consumption. Writing in 2005 on the occasion of Ramirez’s original show at White Columns, critic Roberta Smith wrote: “Ms. Ramirez makes extraordinary watercolors that delineate a stage-set universe … There are signs of violence, frequent indications of romance, sex and family dysfunction.” Critic David Valesco, writing in Art Papers, suggested that: “Aurie Ramirez has created a world as layered as the faces she conjures, as inscrutable as the expressions beneath her masks.”

Over the past twenty five years Ramirez has created one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary bodies of work – invariably watercolor

drawings on paper – that echoes the visionary production of Henry Darger. (Both artists have created psychologically complex imaginary realms inhabited by a recurring cast of characters, scenarios, and narratives).

 

Aurie’s earliest work was inspired by her interest in manifestations of the popular gothic, e.g. the Adams Family, or the rock band Kiss; more recently her work has evolved to describe a paradoxical late–nineteenth century, quasi-Victorian, suburban milieu populated by androgynous, mask-wearing dandies or rainbow-hued waifs. 

Aurie Ramirez (b.1962) lives and works in Oakland, California. Her work has been

included in exhibitions at the Creative Growth Gallery, Oakland; Southern Exposure, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (both San Francisco); as well as in exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France; Galerie Susanne Zander, Cologne; Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany, among others. Her work is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Create’ (co-curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs) at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. 

~

I hope you enjoy my piece for today!  I really fell in love with her artwork.  I also got sucked into The Creative Growth website (http://creativegrowth.org/category/news/) and want to start going to shows there!  It features artists with disabilities and the art I saw was amazing!  I had fun painting this painting today and I will see you tomorrow on Day 130!  Then it’s only 235 to go!  Whew.  Best, Linda