Elise Ansel: Flower of the Mountain

In 2019, I was invited to create an exhibition in conversation with masterpieces in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts museum. When I visited the museum, I was inspired by many of the paintings in the collection, but it was the encounter with two seminal works by female Old Masters, (or "Old Mistresses" as they were famously called by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker in Women, Art and Ideology), Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704 by Rachel Ruysch and Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, ca. 1623-1625 by Artemisia Gentileschi, that proved truly transformative.   

Having spent the last decade looking at art history through a female lens, countering or adding to a male perspective, overturning narratives of violence and voyeurism, rendering subjectivity in the feminine, I was energized by the opportunity to align myself with female artists from another time, another place; to draw strength and inspiration from their accomplishments, and to extend the conversation they began. 

When I engaged with Ruysch’s painting , I realized it was literally crawling with details I wanted to paint. The meaning of the teeming insect life within Flowers in a Glass Vase is evocative and open to interpretation but the stunning beauty of the painting and the details within it, the richness of its voluptuous floral forms, is definite and undeniable. For the first time I began to make collages, moving details within the painting around and hybridizing sections of my own previous transcriptions with details of my paintings of the Ruysch in the collection at the DIA. Details within details, sometimes baroque, luscious, and opulent; sometimes spare and reductive. Trying to get at the truth at the heart of the painting. The idea of the profligate generosity of nature, fecund and fertile, teeming with life and death.

[Elise Ansel]