Olivia Petrides

Olivia Petrides: The Warrior

As dire political and social conditions and the very health of the nation and the world altogether heats up along with the physical environment itself, so all of this is newly reflected in the art of Olivia Petrides. Some time ago she was painting icebergs, then, with greater elegance and command, swirling nebulae in the coolness of space, thoroughly envisioning for us the vast luminescent structures pervading the universe. Increasingly that work became exquisitely refined, serene and other-worldly. It could lift you off your feet, an art of spiritual dimension.

But now it has changed. Her new work now rages against the cataclysm we are facing down here on earth. The work is risky, gnarly and furious — a view into the pit of the beast and his minions we are now encountering in public life. These paintings dare to confront this mayhem, chancing its contagion, risking dissolution, yet these works do not succumb to chaos; they sustain cohesion; we can’t look away. Built within them is the intrinsic structural order that is Olivia’s to command, acquired by way of the integrity that held together her experience gathering up the cosmos. We can look into these riots that are her paintings and grasp them whole. And yet they have wit that allows us just enough distance, room for consideration. Olivia has put her feet on the ground, faced her demons, our demons, and we get to share in this, feel it. This art is a gift; I can suffer the news of the day now!

• — 
• Anthony Phillips, Professor, Painting Department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Surging Ground: The Art of Sarah Krepp and Olivia Petrides

The benefit of a two-artist exhibition is the ability to triangulate on the sharpest points of kinship. Olivia Petrides and Sarah Krepp are abstract artists who are similarly interested in breaking apart the painterly trope of the “ground,” as in “figure/ground,” or the perceptual device of “background,” and even the landscape tradition itself. Using large-scale painting and sculpture, Krepp and Petrides thematize “ground” in materially different ways — Krepp by collecting and transforming blown-out truck tires, and Petrides by making wet, black paintings on the floor in search of full emptiness. Both make a statement about the slippery angle of history on which humans now stand. Each artist elevates the ground to vertical wall space, their strategic subversion of the artist’s visual tool called “ground” in its many perceptual, art historical, and symbolic manifestations.

Olivia Petrides works on the ground to make her large art on paper. Her wet materials collaborate with the horizontal hand of gravity. She pools and pushes her materials to get a chemical, generative reaction from her paints, pens, brushes and collage pieces. These evoke a formless non-space. Long fascinated with the innate abstractions of geological and cosmological phenomena, Petrides’ dedication to looking and learning from the ground began in a more literal way in her illustrations for an ecological field guide in 1992, documenting botanical species for study. Today, a field guide like that one begs the question why an artist is required to deploy her hyper-realism skills to render nature in our era of photography? It is because a hand-made depiction embeds a personal intimacy within the perfect truth of a leaf or bark, which can serve to revalue nature for its emotional and intellectual dimensions, worth keeping alive. Now, in her giant monochromatic paintings, Petrides chases a vast landscape from which there is no grasp of perspective, so we don’t know if we are swirling in the dark matter of the cosmos or buried underground like millennia of fossils.

Sarah Krepp collects exploded rubber tire fragments and nails them to the walls like evidence of life. These materials conjure the screaming road and the choking exhaust of our economic and ecological disaster — reality, greased with crude oil, blowing up in our faces. The round world is being ground to the bone. Over decades in the studio, Krepp has found ways to focus our attention to the shrapnel of our industrial economy. Compelled as an artist, she finds beautiful gestures and compositions within so much chaos. By incorporating both sculpture and painting materials, often in parallel arrangements, Krepp grounds the many languages of her art — the visual and the written and the symbolic and the sensed — into a heap until it topples from its weight, like so many trucks failing to deliver the reaches of our desires.

Although there is a general feeling that we may be headed downward to the inevitable ground economically and politically, as these artists show us, the ground is also a patch where new beginnings may be seeded. Creation happens here. This is why Krepp and Petrides thematize art's illusionistic “ground” as an arena where a new brew of materials, pushed across many surfaces, can intensify our perception of this place where we stand. In making the ground a subject and metaphor of their artworks, and raising it up to our faces, the artists propose that we are in a place worth finding again.

• — 
• Jason Foumberg, Curator, Thoma Art Foundation, Chicago

Olivia Petrides, mid-career, at the Quincy Art Center

Contemporary art continues to break down traditional barriers shedding any discernible image. At the same time modern science battles to laud the earth’s image in order to capture the imagination and build a healthy respect for nature. Artist Olivia Petrides, at mid-career, softens this dichotomy and bridges these worlds. Her early work, small exquisite paintings of plants and trees, grounds her in the respected tradition of scientific illustration, while her recent drawings represent their time, sinking the viewer into an undefined experience.

Her process, rather than image, takes center stage in the new work. Her line performs, rather than describes. She blends the growth of the old traditions with the exploratory nature of a contemporary painter and gives a new way to look at and observe the world around us. Showing Olivia’s development gives the viewer a better understanding of art as a living thing that grows in response to its habitat. The old becomes merely a root which sustains the new.

It has been an honor for me to share the Field Museum experience with Olivia over the past twenty years.

• — 
• Peggy Macnamara, Artist-in-Residence, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; Adjunct Associate Professor, Visual Communication Design department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

To Stand Astonished

How does one stand
To behold the sublime

In the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’ The American Sublime the poet asks how we make ourselves available to an experience of nature that overpowers us without dominion, which astonishes us out of complacency. For Stevens, the modern encounter with nature is rocked by mockery of the transcendent quality of the world, trivialized now as “One grows used to the weather/The landscape and that.” (14–15)

Our modern relationship with the 19th century conception of the sublime — our fearful delight of being overwhelmed by the vast, ineffable world — has lost some currency. Perhaps we have become so inured to the extraordinary that its encounter no longer solicits wonder. Perhaps we no longer feel the pleasure in uncertainty but instead concern ourselves with reasonable questions of cause and effect: who has been here before, what have we done to this place, how can I record this moment for posterity? Nature’s grandeur is familiar now, anesthetized in reproduction and managed as a resource and entertainment. A question then is how do we stand in awe beyond the reasonable and beautiful, beyond thoughts of capturing and measuring that very experience that sets us outside our skin?

These are questions that I feel that Olivia Petrides investigates in her work. She has a history of removing herself to faraway places to observe a litany of phenomena — icebergs and glaciers, the walls of caves, geyser, volcanoes, and the Aurora Borealis. What motivates this journey is Ms. Petrides’ finely honed sense of the pulse of nature. Petrides finds her inspiration in the shifting light and contours of the natural world, reassembling her subject, as in her paintings of icebergs and glaciers in the Arctic Circle, into studies of luminous translucency. Her Aurora — complex marks of jostling, flashing radiance — no more record appearance than encode their equivalence as a process of abstraction. Petrides’ paintings are, as she says, her negotiation of a respectful relationship to the natural world. Her relationship is, I think, a distanced one, born of a keen eye for nuanced, rhythmical patterns and a quiet observation free of exclamation.

What must it have been like to stand in the Arctic Circle and observe these mutable phenomena? I have watched the Aurora Borealis in upstate Minnesota on evenings when the solar storms were strong enough to extend their radiance south. The entire sky flashed with pulses of white light while my companions and I lay speechless, staring up into a late summer night. Words leave first. Emotions subside into an expansive awareness. I cannot imagine how I would paint it! In the history of painting, few have attempted to record the northern lights. Frederick Church’s Aurora Borealis from 1865 is quite literal — the abandoned, ice-locked ship, the immense inhospitable expanse of ice and the radiant arcs of Northern Lights, suspiciously like a halo. The image is heroic and mythic.

Unlike Church’s painting, Petrides does not determine meaning. Her images do not anchor us to time or place or human activity; only an occasional glimpse of stars compasses us skyward. In spirit, her work is closer to the painter Charles Burchfield’s glyph-like marks denoting the sound and pulsation of the natural world. Petrides describes less of what was seen as to what was present — tumultuous brilliance from palatable emptiness.

And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space (16-21)

Petrides supplants the representational mode of nature with gesture and patterns bounded only by the paper, and counseled by a balance between compositional integrity and gestural abandon. Her Auroras are psychic spaces where we stand astonished before an emotive, expressive quality of immanence that releases us from reason’s constraints.

• — 
• Doug Stapleton, Associate Curator of Art, Illinois State Museum

Drawings of the Aurora Borealis: New Work by Olivia Petrides

Olivia Petrides transcribes the coruscating energy of the illuminations produced by solar winds colliding with earth’s magnetic forces with pen, ink and paper. Her drawings of the aurora borealis can be fairly small in size, but the swirling, weaving kinetic masses of tiny marks reveal more as one follows them across the paper and absorbs their sidereal energy.

Petrides became interested in the phenomenon of the northern lights during her travels in Iceland, Greenland and as a resident of the Museum of Natural History in the far-flung Faroe Islands. She begins each piece by painting her paper a deep rich black and then makes her marks with a handmade pen, working from dark to light and back again. Intense storms of white ink and gouache on the deep dark ground challenge the limitations of drawing, capturing the scintillations of light with earthly materials. And she works predominantly in black and white foregoing the power contributed by color. These meetings of the material and celestial, of observable phenomena and abstraction, are only the latest in a series of investigations including icebergs, caves and volcanoes for Petrides, who teaches landscape drawing and scientific illustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And while the Fulbright winning Petrides is extraordinarily skilled and practiced in the rendering required for illustration — where science and art intersect for a moment before they part company — she pursues the aesthetic tradition of the sublime landscape. Emerging from the Romantic period, this interest in the terror and awe of remote and wild landscapes, waterfalls and stormy seas fed poets and writers like Shelley and Melville and painters like Turner and Bierstadt. Petrides’ sublime works are mysterious and resonant, but more focused, leaving out narrative and context, concentrating on the flows and collisions of ions, particles and molecules illuminating the vast skies over dark northern landscapes.

• — 
• Janina A. Ciezadlo, Arts writer

Seas of Possibilities

Olivia Petrides imbues icebergs with a faintly surreal, almost mystical presence. Sarah Krepp creates all-over fields filled with small, irregularly shaped pieces, then superimposes and embeds curvilinear lines and geometric patterns within her richly layered surfaces. When these two artist friends decided to have a two-person show together, they tried to find something that would tie their very different kinds of work together. Side-by-side, there appears to be very little relationship between Petrides’ small, quietly dignified works and Krepp’s large, boldly colored and dynamically abstract canvases. Nevertheless, they discovered a conceptual connection, which is reflected in the title of their exhibition: “Icy/I See: Metaphors of the Sea.” The title refers to both the icy sea (“Icy”) in Petrides’ Greenland seascapes, as well as the vision charts and Braille dots (“I See”) in Krepp’s “White Noise” works. This conceptual word play provides a rationale of sorts, but beyond the pun-filled title, there is also a subtle perceptual component that ties the two diverse bodies of work together.

The swirling, curvilinear patterns endemic to Petrides’ deeply incised, fissured and stratified Greenland icebergs — the sculptural creation of wind, water and freezing temperatures that resembles at various times the folds in a curtain, the drifting of desert sands or ripples in water currents — is echoed in the curvilinear lines traversing the surfaces of Krepp’s works, such as “White Noise: Silence (Golden)” and “White Noise: Whirlwind.” In Krepp’s abstract pieces, however, the circuitous lines seem to chart a “sea” of signs, symbols and shard fragments as if it were the path of a ship navigating a course across an ocean of tiny islands. Sometimes they look like a topographical map superimposed with the weather patterns, fronts and atmospheric conditions of a meteorologist’s diagram. There even is the hint of a grid underlying Krepp’s compositions that seems to evoke the image of latitude and longitude lines.

In one very literal correlation between Petrides’ and Krepp’s work, the latter artist depicts a realistic (at least when seen from a distance), three-dimensional surface of sea waves in a “panel” running along the bottom one-third of the crimson picture plane of “White Noise: Compass Rose.” The remaining space above the bottom panel is filled with a typical swarm of shattered fragments, curvilinear lines, diagonal stripes like those on railroad crossing gates and an eye chart of alphabet-like signs. The irony here is that Krepp’s water and icon images are rendered in a realistic, almost hard-edged manner, whereas Petrides’ approach to water, as well as the iconic character of her icebergs, is far more painterly and romantic, profoundly nuanced and almost dream-like. Hence, the appearance of a “real” thing in Krepp’s overall abstract composition is, paradoxically, more realistic, while figurative things in Petrides’ more classically realistic paintings are depicted in a slightly abstracted, nearly surreal and symbolic way.

In short, what we have here are two different, yet related versions of how the world is shaped by powerful forces. For Petrides, wind, weather conditions and temperature have molded sea, sky and ice. For Krepp, it is the human mind which has created order amid a chaos of symbols, signs and images. In both cases, the artist’s hand has given idiosyncratic shape, order and meaning to what was previously a collection of random objects and things. And in their attempts to find a common ground between figuration and abstraction, both within individual paintings and between each other’s paintings, the artists suggest a similar dynamic in their respective interpretations of reality.

• — 
• Michael Bonesteel, Arts writer and author

Hellenic Museum Presents Olivia Petrides

The daughter of a noted wildlife ecologist, Olivia Petrides spent much of her childhood traveling such remote areas as Uganda, Kenya and South Africa. The topography and geological history of these settings inspired her. As an adult, she went on to draw and study in Yellowstone National Park, whose mountains, geysers and thermal pools reinforced her passions for the fascinating and terrifying aberrations of nature. She eventually found her way to Iceland, which has provided her primary source of inspiration for the last ten years.

These seemingly unrelated locations share a common trait; they are sited along the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates. Their meeting points are magical places in constant flux, where earth’s primal forces result in awe-inspiring natural formations. Their shifting and settling cause earthquakes, geysers and volcanic eruptions. These are dramatic places where creation and destruction are daily manifestations.

By the nature of their climates, these areas are sparsely populated which is reflected in the solitary quality of Petrides’ iceberg paintings. Curiously, however, these paintings do not instill loneliness but offer a contemplative look at nature, a meditative place to rest the eye. Petrides is interested in the “moment before speech; the moment of silence” one experiences in the presence of these sublime forces. The intimate scale of her paintings further serves her purpose of making accessible the overwhelming presence of her subjects.

Despite her interest in and experience with science, these paintings are devoid of the scientific detail of textbook illustrations. They are “mental icebergs”; more than what she sees, Petrides paints what she knows and feels before these landscapes. Some of the mood-laden scenes like “Greenland Iceberg IV” are merely vehicles to express a state of mind. Some, like “Greenland Iceberg VI” and “Greenland Iceberg II”, are clearly portraits.

Most of the paintings in this exhibition are from Petrides’ travels through Greenland and Iceland. The irony of the naming of these neighboring Antarctic countries is evident in the artist’s palette. The paintings of Greenland — so named to encourage settlers to venture to this treacherous place — are dominated by icy blue, stark white and steely black. The paintings of Iceland — named to discourage overpopulations and perhaps to deter visitors — are dominated by warm earth tones: ochres, siennas and greens. In addition to the paintings, we are fortunate to have a selection of watercolors torn from the artist’s Iceland and Greenland sketchbooks. Their immediacy and candor provide us with a window into the mind of their creator.

• — 
• Kiki Haralambides, Curator

Freeze Frames: Petrides’ Paintings Take Viewers Out to Sea, Chicago Sun-Times, July 24, p. 49

Petrides has in fact traveled extensively in the North Atlantic and in her travels has produced paintings of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, some of which are now on view at Artemesia Gallery. And although she is neither a realist painter nor a scientist, Petrides still manages to create works that at least appear to document specific climatic conditions and ice formations as if they are the observations of a naturalist.

In a witty reversal of scale, the iceberg paintings are all 5 by 15 inches. Each one is a study of looming masses of floating ice, and they all look as though they were created on the deck of a ship pitching through icy waters.

This old-fashioned, you-are-there quality makes for exciting paintings. Small as they are, they conjure surprisingly deep emotions of excitement and desolation in the presence of these grand and terrifying natural forms.

In most of these strangely intense paintings, the water and sky are a menacing black blue, a color suggesting bone-deep cold and unseen danger. The ice itself is full of color, an emotional spectrum of purple, blue and sickly gray.

Even in Petrides’ daylight views, the water is clearly an alien environment in which ice looms as monster, as god, as protagonist. There is no human presence in these paintings, and none is needed. Rather they speak of a natural world so big, so impersonally destructive, so beautiful and grand that human life has no significant place there.

Also at Artemesia is a tight little show of graphite drawings by Vera Scekic. Scekic’s work, while it also refers to the natural world, is as clean and smooth as Petrides’ paintings are crude and bumpy. Basically abstract compositions based on natural substances, these drawings are rendered so smoothly and with such refinement they appear to be photographs at first. But photos of what?

One drawing, “Multi-Particle Event,” shows arcs and lines against a blue ground. It could be a star map or the elegant remainders of an algebraic equation worked out on a blackboard with no erasures.

Another, “Bitewing,” shows the delicate image of teeth, dimly visible as they appear on a dental X-ray. These are elegant drawings, finely rendered yet without the grandiosity that sometimes accompanies virtuosity. They seem to refer to galaxies and at the same time to microscopic views of lifeforms and are presented with the cool impartiality of medical illustration.

Downstairs at A.R.C. Gallery is a collection of mini-collages by Marcie Gill-Kinast. With none measuring more than 4 inches in any direction, these little fabrications are built inside box tops and look like what Joseph Cornell might have produced if he'd been a mad child with nothing to work with but his own broken toys.

Gill-Kinast works with tiny parts, mostly plastic toys of the kind that shoot out of bubble gum machines or show up as favors in Cracker Jack boxes. This is not a new idea, combining bric-a-brac and junk in bright, pleasing ways to comment on the obsessive superficiality of our throwaway culture. Plastic doll heads, mini-trolls, costume jewelry, dime store trinkets, beads and marbles, it's the same stuff we’ve seen a lot of in galleries over the past decade or so. What is eye-catching about this artist’s work, though, is the cumulative effect of hundreds of these little junkocosms massed together and hung in neat rows on two walls.

They suck you in, begin to create a hypnotic effect that only one or two or a dozen or even a hundred would not have. This format of miniature toys in brown boxes begins to look like a norm, forcing the viewer to inspect each piece more closely to differentiate it from the others. The viewer starts to see how quickly each box becomes its own absorbing world and how odd that world is. In one, a Barbie doll head is blindfolded, bound and gagged with colored rubber bands and surrounded by tiny black beads that look like caviar or gunshot.

In the midst of all this glitter and pink plastic, it is a provocative and satisfyingly creepy thing, and here is where the language of these little plastic gewgaws begins to make sense.

• — 
• Margaret Hawkins, Art Critic, Chicago Sun-Times

Art People: Olivia Petrides’ Voyages of Discovery, Chicago Reader, October 3, Section One, p. 46

The child of a big-game biologist father and a gardener mother, painter Olivia Petrides began learning about nature at an early age. By the time she was 22, her family had lived in such far-flung locales as Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. Her father researched guides on plant life and taught Petrides to identify trees, observe animal tracks, and match scat to its source.

Eventually she collaborated with her father on several field guides, including Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Trees, a three-year project that required photographic exactitude. She illustrated 35 types of oak leaves and 27 kinds of willows. “When you grow up in that environment, you don't know what a sparrow is,” Petrides says, “but you know what a field sparrow is or what a white-crowned sparrow is. You don’t experience generics. Your experience is in very concrete details.”

In the summer of 1993 Petrides traveled to Iceland on a Fulbright research grant, and she spent the long days making sketches for her landscape-based abstract paintings. She'd often board a bus that followed the country’s single highway and ask the driver to let her off when they reached a place she wanted to draw. “Being there was like being a researcher,” Petrides says. “Other than these field guides, I'm not really a realistic painter, but I felt like I was somehow respecting the landscape if I just recorded it and then went back to my studio and did more abstract pieces.” At the end of the summer she returned to Chicago with sketchbooks full of birds, flowers, and landscapes.

Petrides visited Iceland again the following summer to record images of the island’s interior, which so resembles the moon that U.S. astronauts trained there for their 1969 landing. She also heard about Denmark’s Faeroe Islands, an archipelago of 18 volcanic islands clustered in the North Atlantic midway between Iceland and Scotland. “They seemed so mysterious,” Petrides says. “People would say, ‘Well, you’ll never get there.’”In his book Last Places writer Lawrence Millman describes the Faeroes as one of the most remote areas on the planet. “I thought, OK, that’s good enough for me.’ Petrides spent three weeks there in the summer of 1995. “They’re in the mist all the time. It’s a little Brigadoon-ish. They just sort of disappear and appear.”

While on the chain of islands, she met artists, including painters, a glass blower, a sculptor, and a textile artist who also designed postage stamps. She curated an exhibit of work by these artists, and the show later traveled to Seattle’s Nordic Heritage Museum. It comes to Chicago this weekend. “There’s something about going to a country and swallowing up their imagery,” she says. “I like to give something back.”

• — 
• Todd Savage

Sublime Landscapes Translated Into A Trio of Tongues, The Christian Science Monitor, August 28.

Some places are beautiful, and some places are sublime. The American painter Olivia Petrides traveled to Iceland in 1993 and 1994, and to the Faroe Islands in 1995, which resulted in uncommonly evocative works.

“Catkins & Mt. Esja (May)” (below), is from Petrides’s Iceland sketchbooks. Its “sublimity” defies the paper’s 7 by 10 inches.

It is a concentration, without littleness, of the vast rigors of the landscape. It leaps from the tough, upright willow stem standing totemic in the foreground to the distant undulations of snow-vivid mountains and the intense blue of the lower sky. A darkly broken cloudscape weighs down over this light space.

The deep yellow of the catkins’ pallen, edging the rounded forms like auras, is disseminated in the sky: near and far are linked, the tangible and the unreachable Harsh black striated rock faces slide down in the middle distance. The eye does not move smoothly through this picture, but bounds abruptly through it, buffeted by its forces. One feels suspended in midair, without footing.

The way Petrides paints here (using an opaque water-based gouache, applied with an impact close to that of oil) transposes the immediacy of a surrounding experience into an immediacy of paint-on-paper. Although this is a work of observation, it is a long way from being just a topographical record or illustration. It is fraught with feeling. The phrases “nature painter” or “naturalist artist” do not go far enough. Petrides conveys a sensibility in awe of the wild reaches of the earth. She talks about “forces.”

“I am choosing landscapes that are very much about that,” she says in an interview. “I am choosing very dramatic places. The forces... are quite evident.”

She has painted not only in Iceland, but in Yellowstone National Park, “also a very volcanic area. That’s what interested me in Iceland. I looked at a map, and I looked at the edges of these tectonic plates.” Indeed, her grand plan is to follow the edges of the tectonic plates that form the crust of the earth, and whose collisions and shifts cause tremors, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.

Petrides says that she did not draw at all as a child. Her beginnings were actually more in the sciences. But her earliest travels were motivated by the importance of looking. To observe and to record were instilled in her. These “child adventures were instigated by her father, the ecologist Dr. George Petrides, author of four “Peterson Field Guides” to American trees. As his daughter — who was later to produce scrupulous, explicit, strongly designed illustrations for some of her father’s books — recalls: “We traveled as a family a great deal, and his is rather a visual discipline. Maybe I was trained in that without realizing it.”

As a painter, Petrides considers herself “a late starter.” She was 28 before she went to art school. Before that, in her junior year of college, while on a year abroad, she first visited art museums. This was in Germany, and she had a revelatory encounter with the work of one of that country’s 20th-century greats, Emil Nolde.

On the evidence of her Icelandic sketches, it was Nolde’s landscapes and flower/garden paintings that struck her forcibly. In them, natural forms rear up like visions, primally expressive and intense, exotic, stormy, and mood-laden in color. These exhilarating midnight-sun paintings carry the viewer away by sheer conviction. “I thought he was wonderful,” Petrides recalls, “and I wondered what it was like to paint like that.”

She did not stop at wondering.

The art school she went to first was the one attached to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is now an adjunct associate professor of painting and drawing. She finds the demand to look — and to have her students look — at a great range of other artists” work a useful stimulus. Environmental artists are of special interest. She mentions Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, both Britons.

But it is Thérese Oulton’s work that Petrides takes time to describe. What she finds fascinating in this British painter’s work is “the huge mass of paint that she makes with very discreet little strokes.” It “could be produced maybe more gesturally, but she chooses to do it in this very meticulous, laborious way.”

In her own large work — “Rock & Whirlpool” is a powerful example - Petrides structures her images by building up many smaller movements. These are predominantly linear, not unlike the contouring of three-dimensional form found in some sculptors’ drawings. With her interest in geological formations, it might be surprising if her work was not in some way sculptural. But she achieves this quality not with a mallet and chisel but by insistent drawing, by tight, strong lines that give rock a dark solidity, water an insucking concentricity. The lines contain the sky as if framed by a cave mouth.

Color in these big studio drawings is reduced to minimally concentrated significance; the main impetus is one of rhythmic motion through a fundamentally monochrome space and light.

Her works seem naturally to fit into three interrelated compartments: vigorously precise botanical illustrations, large drawings, and sketches, which she sees as “different languages.” One is “probably a more ‘scientific’ language,” another “more ‘aesthetic.” She says that “no one language could describe a place, but maybe several could....”

In her own mind, her apparently diverse aspects “all relate to one another... I think the most important things are the sketchbooks. That whole experience of being outside and sketching. From these sketchbooks I can go into the more precise work, or I can go into my studio and do the looser work.”

The sketches she sees as “collecting sense data,” and as “a vehicle to make me sit still — I look and listen.... That’s the important part of what I do; I mean the idea of it, not the product. The memory of sitting there and doing it.”

Central to that “memory” are the forces she sees in the environment in which she has worked. “I think that is what I try to do in the large pieces: I am sort of enacting those forces.”

• — 
• Christopher Andreae

Olivia Petrides: Time and Eternity, Morgunbladid, August 12, 1994

It is not often that we get to see charcoal drawings on exhibit in this country, and the sketches we have sometimes seen are more often than not made with pencil or chalk. The American artist Olivia Petrides has two exhibits in the Reykjavik area comprised of very large drawings, executed in charcoal and oil pastel, which is even more unusual around here.

The artist is an adjunct associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has been working since 1985. Petrides came here on a Fulbright Grant in 1993, or more specifically on a “Fulbright-Hays Senior Scholar Research Grant.” As is apparent from her drawings, the people and the land had great influence on her, especially the volcanic forms of Iceland’s geology. She was captivated by the timelessness that she thought was the main characteristic of Icelandic landscapes. This idea of the eternal, evoked by Iceland, is passionately conveyed in her images.

She made one picture that reflects this strong influence, where time and eternity are the main components of the visual structure, and took it with her to the States. This image inspired many others. The major theme in all the works is similar, but diversely refined. The drawings by Olivia Petrides are dark, intense, and imposing. It is clear that she tries to invoke a spell which embraces the influences the land had upon her, and which probably includes tales of its supernatural beings, although this is not obvious in the finished artworks. Thus, the drawings are not diagrams of the external, but the expression of inner tension with diverse objective allusions and symbols, such as birds, suns and planets; and pendulums, which point to the passing of time and to infinity.

Free imagination and invented forms characterize the drawings at the American Cultural Center, whereas birds are the main theme and visual structure of the works at Hafnarborg. What most impressed me in both exhibits was the strength and simplicity of the wellstructured images, where the essence is a compact and controlled expressive power.

• — 
• Bragi Asgeirsson