The Art of The Heidi Chronicles

It's the final week of The Heidi Chronicles. For those who have seen our production, you'll remember that after each scene a painting is taken off of the wall. We were very excited to have these paintings; they were painted by artist Nicola McCarthy specifically for the show to evoke the emotional and historical context for the scene during which they are highlighted. Each painting is also an homage to the work of a particular twentieth century female artist and Nicola took time to write a little about her inspirations for us. She also let us put photos of her paintings above each description and a photo of one of the paintings that inspired hers on the right or below.

Act One, Scene One: Painting inspired by Bridget Riley’s Drift series


Bridget Riley is one of the leading lights of the 60's Op Art movement, she inspired a wave of bold graphic design in fashion. Her paintings present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or colour, said to induce sensations in viewers as varied as seasickness and sky diving. If you stare at them for a minute, you will see the sense of movement – vibrating, flashing, throbbing – and perceive illusions of perspective or 3-dimensional space. The effect is mesmerizing, illuminating... but dizzying!

Act One, Scene Two: Painting inspired by Judy Chicago’s Through The Flower


Judy Chicago is a feminist artist who has been making work since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into art-making coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance. Major works include The Dinner Party and The Holocaust Project. She came to be known as an essentialist as she saw something innate and essential to the female species that could be represented by round objects and openings (i.e. female sex organs).

Act One, Scene Three: Painting inspired by Lee Krasner’s Black and White and Pink Collage


Lee Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. She married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement. Comrades in art, Pollock and Krasner fought a battle for legitimacy, impulsiveness and individual expression. They opposed an old-fashioned, conformist, and repressed culture unreceptive to these values, which was put off by the intricacy of Modernism in general.

Act One, Scene Four: Painting inspired by the Guerrilla Girls’ Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?


The Guerrilla Girls are a group of radical feminist artists established in New York City in 1985, known for using creative posters to promote women and people of color in the arts. Their first work was putting up posters on the streets of New York decrying the gender and racial imbalance of artists represented in galleries and museums. Over the years they expanded their activism to examine Hollywood and the film industry, popular culture, gender stereotyping and corruption in the art world. In 2001 they split into three groups, Guerrilla Girls, Inc.; GuerrillaGirlsBroadBand and Guerrilla Girls On Tour.

Act One, Scene Five: Painting inspired by Yoko Ono’s Painting to Hammer a Nail


Yoko Ono Lennon is a Japanese-American artist and musician. She is known for her marriage to John Lennon and for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician. Ono was an explorer of conceptual and performance art.


Act Two, Scene One: Painting inspired by Alice Neel’s The Pregnant Woman


Alice Neel (January 28, 1900 – October 13, 1984) was an American artist known for her oil on canvas portraits of friends, family, lovers, poets, artists and strangers. Her paintings are notable for their expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity.

Act Two, Scene Two: Painting inspired by Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground)


Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist. Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work. The text in her work of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "you invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."

Act Two, Scene Four: Painting inspired by Joan Mitchell’s Sunflower Series


Joan Mitchell was a ‘Second Generation’ Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across America and Europe.

Act Two, Scene Five: Painting inspired by Marlene Dumas’ The Painter


Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She studied at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 1975 and moved to the Netherlands on a scholarship when she was 23. She's been living in Amsterdam for many years. She often uses reference material of Polaroid photographs of her friends and lovers, whilst she also references magazines and pornographic material. Marlene Dumas also paints portraits of children and erotic scenes to impact the world of contemporary art.

Photo Credits:
All photos of Nicola McCarthy's paintings taken by Fred Pitts
Drift No. 2, Through the Flower, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum? and The Painter from Artnet (http://www.artnet.com)
Black and White and Pink Collage from The City Review (http://www.thecityreview.com/krasner.html)
Paiting to Hammer a Nail in from AskArt (http://www.askart.com/askart/o/yoko_ono/yoko_ono.aspx)
Yves by Joan Mitchell from Hauser & Wirth (http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/322/joan-mitchell-sunflowers/view/)
Pregnant Woman from ArtConcerns.com (http://www.artconcerns.net/2007MayBaroda/html/baroda_birthright.htm)
Untitled (Your body is a battleground) from Stanford BodyWorks Syllabus (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/BodyWorks/11300/04.htm)