# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf09R2GhXBW
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046136-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/4766681a18.jpg
- **Posted:** 2018-03-02T16:25:26.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction. 〰
Vija Celmins (b. 1938) is an American-Latvian artist whose photorealistic drawings and paintings explore the quiet wonder of everyday objects and nature. Celmins began her career drawing mundane things like lamps, TVs, and the space heater in her studio. Drawing from her own photographs, the hyperrealistic works do not use perspective, viewpoint, or horizon,  thus removing the human context from these objects, placing them in an eerie void. Generally working in series, Celmins’ favorite subjects include moon surfaces, the desert, ocean, and the night sky. Most well-known are her ocean works, which were drawn using photographs she took of the Venice pier in the 1960s. The monochromatic close-ups of the waters surface involve a laborious process that often takes years for Celmins to complete works. She explains: "...wrestle a giant image into a very tiny area and make it stay there so that it seems inevitable that it is there." During her childhood, Celmin’s family fled Latvia under Soviet occupation to Germany, but was a refugee again under the Nazi regime until her family was relocated to the United States. She focused on drawing and nature as an escape. "I guess my work sometimes confuses people, because I really have nothing to say about the ocean, or the sky, or the moon," Celmins explains. "It’s more about the feeling of the magic of making things I could never have mine: my airplane, my ocean, my sky." Vija Celmins is included among the artists shown in "The Long Run", an exhibition of innovative art at MoMA through November 4. 〰
#VijaCelmins themuseumofmodernart 
Image: Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen, 2002.

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## Tags

vijacelmins, artistinaction

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