starting with found objects.

Relating to Steven's (Berekhat Ram) project, and our discussion of working with "found" objects and texts, and developing those, our discussion touched on the work of Vija Celmins.

See this recent article in The New Yorker —

Onward and Upward with the Arts
Vija Celmins’s Surface Matters
Calvin Tomkins. The New Yorker. September 2, 2019 Issue
here

“To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI,” from 1977-82. ©Vija Celmins

The fantastically intricate task of reproducing the eleven stones took five years. (She was doing other things as well.) Working with the smallest brushes and acrylic paint, she matched the colors and every speck and marking on the found stones, so precisely that even she has trouble telling the original from the copy. Celmins believes that, if you spend enough time on a work, something else might come into play, “some subtlety that my brain was not capable of figuring out.” Like Johns, she is interested in testing the margins between art and reality.

“Vija’s different from other artists I know, who go into the studio and really enjoy it,” Happy Price told me. “Vija has struggles.” When Celmins was working on her rock piece, Price remembers her saying, “I’m crazy, why am I doing this?”
(p23)