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| Inta Celmiņa Laima Slava Born in Riga, 7 January 1946. 1957-1964 Attended the Janis Rozentāls Riga Secondary School of Art. 1964-1969 Studied at the Teaching Department of the Latvian Academy of Art. Since 1969 paints in oil on canvas and participates in exhibitions. 1969-1976 Teacher at Riga Secondary School of Applied Arts. 1976-1988 Senior Lecturer at the Department of Teaching of the Latvian Academy of Art. 1988-2003 Free artist. Since 2003 - Lecturer in painting, drawing, composition and colour at the Faculty of Computer Design of the International Higher School of Practical Psychology. Solo exhibitions in Latvia, Sweden, France and the USA. Awards at exhibitions in Latvia and the Baltic. 1984 Silver medal of the Salon Français at the exhibition "Traditions and Quests" in Paris | |
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Inta Celmiņa is a painter. An artist whose work we associate first and foremost with light emerging from darkness, elicited by means of rhythmic brushstrokes in similar shades of tonal colour, with freely composed female figures diminishing into winds of storm and stress, and - princesses. True, the princesses may also occur in association with horses and birds, but it's abundantly clear that Inta's works inhabit a refined, emphatically feminine world of thought and emotion, which certainly does not mean tinkering about with petty details of everyday life or playful tittering. As regards "a girl's best friends" (diamonds, of course), a delight in adornment is glimpsed only occasionally in some corner of the painting, since mystery is more important. Ever-present mystery. Indeed, it might be regarded as the quintessence of femininity in Inta Celmiņa's work. Inta herself has something of the selfassurance, the bearing and the witch's wisdom possessed by a keeper of the secret of the Great Mother (so that both the nettle shirt and the glitter of precious metals and gemstones form part of her essence), and her "witch's cauldron" is colour, the stuff of painting. Initial training in Socialist Realism at the Rozentāls School was followed by the Art Academy, where some of the old masters were still teaching, and where the approach to painting was already somewhat freer; then there was teaching work at the Secondary School of Applied Arts, with Imants Žūriņš's cult of tonal colour derived from folk art - such was the road to the young artists' exhibitions of the seventies. At this time, Inta Celmiņa attracted attention with her first discovery - the search for "light in darkness" in large format paintings, covered in brushstrokes in similar tones but in different directions. "Bushes", "Hills", "The Apple Tree", "The Town", etc. Brown-blacks, greys and greens - such was her colour palette. Seemingly warm, but actually rather cool. Reserved, certainly. All very disciplined and possessing inner distance. It seems as if Inta was studying herself under the microscope and arranging the scene in such a way that within this structure of painted volumes, the colours detect like a radar the only precise sound resonating within her. "In those days, my ideal was a painting created using a single colour, a single tone, achieving form solely by changing the direction of the brushstrokes." Of course, this reflects a youthful desire for self-cognisance, plus the experience and impulses of the Žūriņš school. The introduction of contrasting colour accents in works that have grown more temperamental, but are still constructed of rhythmic cascades of brushstrokes - this might be regarded as the next significant turning-point. For example, "The Concert" (1979) and "The Trio" (1978). Clearly, the impetus for painting comes from an intimately experienced mood, a special condition of the soul, and the presence of music is a quite unmistakeable symbol of all this, but it's clear that some kind of opening-up had occurred. The boundary previously drawn so strictly around her ego had been overstepped, succumbing to novel impulses that were as yet unformulated. And yes, these accents are warm, even passionate: yellow-white and red. It's perhaps worth recalling that in the conditions prevailing in Soviet Latvia, precisely Inta Celmiņa's generation was the one to choose openly a variety of ways of being an artist, no longer restricted to pure painting, sculpture or graphic art. (Take Atis Ieviņš, for example, the subject of another portrait in this issue!) Even when pure painting was chosen as the medium, the search for one's own private voice might find expression through consistently classical, traditional values - colour and painted form (Helēna Heinrihsone, Inta Celmiņa, Vija Maldupe, Juris Baklāns, Ivars Heinrihsons and others), or else through quite different qualities - a realistic or surreal narrative based on emphatic use of line or ornamental fantasy, impassionate photographic documentation, emphasis on the meditative meaning of the painting process itself, and other expressions (Miervaldis Polis, Līga Purmale, Leo Mauriņš, Juris Dimiters, etc). To be a "pure" painter in accordance with the supreme criteria of this language of art and to find one's own place, one's own voice in this field that already had such a rich history of achievement meant not only turning to the deeply personal, away from political trends, but also turning away from social trends (which limit one's aims to neatly-worked, professionally perfected, decorative and unpretentious salon art). And even away from the trends of the art scene, so that ideas of revolutionising form and media slide into the background. Certainly, in the case of Inta Celmiņa, it's a matter of a defiantly conservative striving for painting as a traditional, classical value, continuing to delve into the possibilities of the language of colour, with the artist as a person using their talent and chosen medium to approach existential questions that have been important at all times, questions posed by the very process of living. When the first "princesses" appeared in the early eighties, something broke down in the hitherto classical structure. The use of a drawing of a child introduced dissonance into the composition. Dubuffet and Gaston Chaissack contrasted this with a rough background, such as a wall texture or an imitation of colouring by a child's hand. Likewise, Aija Zariņa later came to employ schematic drawings of a similar kind as the foundation for expression, to which the overall composition was subordinated. Inta retains a painterly fine, colour-rich, sensitive setting, in which the child's drawing (or more accurately, a reminder of it) plays out its fantasy stories. "The Princess and Austra" (1981) still represents a combination of a portrait of a child and a child's drawing, emphasising the difference between the two viewpoints. And now the way was open: there followed a string of works exhibiting painterly freedom (still continuing) where the schematic immediacy of the child's perception has taken over, obviating the need to reckon with the academic skill at representing figural form, in order to open the way for visions of the expressiveness of colour - something that only a mature artist can accomplish. The princesses, the dream of every child as a little woman, are naively drawn and coloured with a pure heart. But only a mature woman can comprehend how much deep and fragile feeling they contain, how much life-determining desire. Inta herself considers "Moonlight" (1990) her paradigmatic work from the eighties and nineties period - a transparent, fragile princess in a mysterious nocturnal scene. This particular work now augments the National Museum's collection. But true liberation in painting started when Inta began to represent the forms of the female figure on paper or canvas. Here she feels absolutely free, and one can only admire how few lines and colour areas are needed to express whole storms of emotion, elusive conditions of the soul or simply happiness at the innate value of the female body. All the recent developments in Inta Celmiņa's palette reveal that there's no limit to her capacity for accomplishment in this realm, that the mysteries of the movement of the body (the female body in particular) represent her natural element, to whose power any medium succumbs, even with the most minimalistic touch of colour on the surface. Currently enjoying world acclaim among women painters in the context of the major joint exhibitions is Marlene Dumas, with her distinctive light, airy technique of painting, which gives a profound and precise characterisation, an accurate likeness, while at the same time presenting harsh and impressive images. Such, after all, is the artist's theme - apprehension of the constant presence of death. Looking through a pile of works that Inta Celmiņa had bashfully hidden away in drawers, I noticed that she had developed such an approach already in the 1990s, but in figural works rather than portraits, testifying not only to virtuoso professional ability, but also to something that is quite the opposite to the art of the South African painter - the changing beauty of the vitality of the female body, a life-affirming mystery, in which woman is at once an instrument, an aim and a substance in some higher plan. Something taken directly from the "drawer collection" is also seen in this portrait. | |
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