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Davida Schulman: Selected Works
Wednesday, September 30 - Thursday, December 31, 1998

The 4th Show (Arts Vision Inc./Miglin-Beitler)
Time & Life Building
541 North Fairbanks
Chicago, Illinois

Davida Schulman is an artist with an impressive body of work. That she is showing in four separate venues this fall is testimony to the respect that her work receives. Arts Vision Inc. will offer several of her works in a group showing at the Time & Life Building through December 31st. Two more of her pieces are included in "The Agony & The Ecstasy" at Prairie State College, 202 South Halsted Street, Chicago Heights, Illinois, 60411 (Phone: 708/709-3500). The Prairie State College exhibit presents her two watercolors, "Self-Portrait with Brushes & Mugs" (1998) and her "Self-Portrait with Brushes & Olympia" (1998). That show runs till November 21st. The Dellora A. Norris Cultural Arts Center, 1040 Dunham Rd., St. Charles, Illinois, is showing some of her work through December 12, l998; And the Chicago Arts Coalition offers an open showing at 847 W. Jackson, 3rd Floor Gallery. These are art venues well worth investigating.

The painter's own statement is the best introduction to her works: "My self-portraits are made to convey something of who I am both physically and psychically. My physical appearance and contemporary culture's attitudes to that appearance have impacted upon my sense of self. My self-portraits are an examination of the interaction of my culture, my physicality, and my self in terms of my gender and vocation. But, as a single group, my paintings on canvas, watercolors, and prints are also a questioning, for women and for men, of the social meanings placed upon the female body by contemporary culture."

Davida Schulman has produced over forty self-portraits to date. Her current pieces in the Time & Life Building show, however, demonstrate that even when she steps back from her idee fixe the artist remains particularly adept at the connoting image -- an image that leaps beyond what is figuratively evident. This is a type of seeing for which an artist such as Edward Hopper is best known.

Literary critic, Hugh Kenner, once observed of Ezra Pound's poetic Imagisme: "The action passing through any Imagist poem is a mind's invisible action discovering what will come next that may sustain the presentation -- what image, what rhythm, what allusion, what word -- to the end that the poem shall be 'lord over fact,' not the transcript of one encounter but the Gestalt of many,..." It is this leap of the viewer's mind that inspirits Hopper's and Davida Schulman's most successful works. It is not an easy achievement. It is not the art school definition of 'realism.' It is an aesthetic metaphysics.

This "mind's invisible action' within the viewer is best seen in Schulman's two pieces on view at the Time & Life Building. In both oils on canvas, "The Boys Are at Home" and "Not Happy Days," the title and image collide and the viewer is thrown back onto a personal and visceral response which transcends both title and image. In a country and age where 'sound bites' and 'photo ops' usurp any shared, traditional iconography, this type of seeing forges a powerful stategem for art. And Schulman doesn't need to rationalize it -- she feels and just does it.

The overwhelming focus in her work, as she herself has stated, is indeed on body image and gender role. She is especially concerned with the impact on older women. Schulman once commented in an "Artists of Rogers Park" profile that: "...though women have been establishing themselves as artists, a woman, especially a large, middle-aged matron, standing, sometimes naked, in her studio, is not only unusual but, shocking to most viewers. I present this in a very straightforward manner to remind the world that all women don't come in the size and age dictated by popular media."

What do Auguste Rodin, Ivan Albright and Davida Schulman have in common? Rodin's "La Belle Heaulmiere" sculpturally presents a once beautiful woman, now old and withering. Ivan Albright's oil, "Into The World There Came A Soul Called Ida" (1929-30) shocked and repulsed many gallery visitors when it was first displayed. And these modern works, while powerful and moving, do not stand alone. They provoke shock, but also pity. Artists such as Rodin and Albright take the extremes of nature and communicate the potential for cruelty in human nature, by evoking distaste and then pity in the viewer. And they question the viewer's motives and sincerity. Pity is not compassion. Much less acceptance. And most of today's viewers are not like those of Rodin's or even Albright's time.

Davida Schulman's works are of a very different nature. Her works convey a resolute dignity and strength; I cannot see them as shocking, but rather, surprisingly defiant, displaying a resolute personality, one that is perhaps even serenely provocative. Schulman's taciturn strength as a self-model is more moving and eloquent, more genuinely effective in fulfilling her explicit intentions, than all the art brut churned out by academic assembly lines; it is more convincingly persuasive and winning-over than decades of gender theoreticians and ideologues.

This is not to imply that her works intend what Rodin's or Albright's aimed at, but rather the obverse -- she understands what she is about, it is different from earlier or even most contemporary perceptions, and she achieves a very contemporary image and sensibility. I believe that Davida Schulman's self-portraits approach a condition, and contribute to a condition, where the initial concerns of her art are no longer so worrisome. After all, when Rodin's first modeling for "Balzac" was revealed, the public was outraged that the great French novelist was portrayed nude and potbellied. Today we are more likely to be irritated by the cocksure swagger of the model than by the nudity or physique given him by the artist.

Schulman has recently noted: "I've been working with watercolor to explore ways to express myself by moving beyond the self-portrait. My own image still appears in my work during this process with the addition of new studio trappings which include dolls, traditional still life subject matter, the images created by the stars of art history, and images of the significant people in my life." Her recent watercolors (such as those at the Christopher Gallery/Prairie State College, and at the Norris Cultural Arts Center) make frequent use of a circular vignette framing convention, much like E. C. Escher's self-portrait in a mirroring globe. This is a time-honored device, but Schulman uses it to retain a central focus on the portrait, while increasing the scope of her surrounding imagery. It will be of great interest in her future showings to follow where this will lead.

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.