Olive Ayhens : The World is Shaking

Olive in her studio.

Olive with me, my daughter and grandaughter

She is holding her Grand Central painting.

Olive:

The Grand central piece was a commission celebrating the hundred year anniversary. I was over joyed to do it & hang out in such a gorgeous place. It is for everyone in their travels. I love it!

Olive Ayhens painting is extraordinarily detailed, at the same time she conveys a sense of emergency through instability that courses through all of her paintings. As you see here the cars flow through the station and there is an inside outside that is purposely iuxtaposed

Simultaneity is a key aspect of all of Ayhens paintings

Olive:

“The Grand Central piece was a com mission celebrating the hundred year anniversary. I was over joyed to do it & hang out in such a gorgeous place. It is for everyone in their travels.

Let us begin at the beginning

Nutty Woman and Calm Man 1971 dates from Ayhens early work in San Francisco. The artist provides this context:

“Nutty Woman and Calm Man, an early work from my mid twenties. I was raised in the middle ages, Dutch Reformed. I denounced it around age 17. This painting is a garden of lush love. I wanted to make sex beautiful after all my oppression.”

Incandescent 1981 If you look closely there is a woman impaled or trapped on an odd shape ( another figure?)The glowing yellow streams in all directions as she is immersed in its force. On the left side of the painting are several other figures swimming helplessly,

The artist:

“Incandescence is a later piece 1982, the beginning of my relationship with Joe. Again the theme is love between men and women. An erotic piece.”

In the mid 1990s Olive moved to New York City on a fellowship These two landscapes were done in 1996

City Moves In

Olive: “the second oil I did after I moved to NYC . I had taught in Montana(for an academic year) then back to S.F. still working from Montana inspiration then I received the free studio in NYC. So the painting has NYC on one side and Montana on the other. I really like the layering of the water.”

Metabolic Landscapes.

In the second one we see a line of cars driving across the water passing a flooded urban island of skyscrapers.

Olive:

“Too many cars in NYC! I am sending Rapid Commute perhaps the best oil of that series, skyscrapers instead of cliffs on the sides.

A few years later (2005) she painted a shopping mall with soldiers guarding it. It seems eerily predictive today.

In 1999-2000 Ayhens had a residency in the World Trade Center, and she painted from on high looking down, but always with her own imagination. That habit persisted

Lamb 2006 This is one of Ayhens characteristic juxtapositions, the coffins are placed in the midst of a luxury environment with a swimming pool, as well as a crazy line up of computers suggesting who ever might work there isn’t paying any attention ( there are no living people in this painting)

Another ongoing fascination in her painting is extinct mammals They appear frequently as in this work, an extinct “camelid” standing on the shore in NYC.

Camelid in the City 2019. The poignency of this painting, of the lone creature standing on the edge of the East River with our city in the background, tells us how different our world is from that of these prehistoric beasts.

Olive: I was fed up with the human species. We can’t stop killing each other, sadists! So I got into the mammals that came before us, put a camelid in the NYC estuary.

We see Ancient fauna in these two sketches

Critters in the Cathedral Here- they are really taking over our paltry civilization

One of my favorites is Amphibian Emergency 2007. The frogs have moved into the highrise, obviously here humourously commenting on loss of habitat.

Olive: “I do work with our ancestors the big mammals.., endanagered and extinct animals, an example Amphibian Emergency. It has humor as the frogs are taking over the luxury condominium.”

Memories of Beasts

In this work: the beasts are inside a Moorish structure on a blue tiled floor

Olive:

“Memories of Beasts is a totally positive painting. These are animals from my past life experiences who I loved, some are my pets, some from art history, &some from my imagination, I put them in Moorish architecture(had just been to Spain & worship the Alhambra) & medieval architecture.”

the Bristolcone Pines

Olive: “about the Bristlecone Pines, oldest living trees on our planet average age about 4000 years, they can be found in CA, Nev. & Utah.. It was absurd that I placed them on a balcony over looking NYC.”

The City is shaking

Interior Wilderness 2008 : the wind is blowing through the space and everything is falling down.

Olive Interior Wilderness, Nature in juxtaposition to a luxury condo, maybe hotel, two endangered frogs, nature seems to be winning.

Here the artist holds Long Summer night 2024

Long Summer Night 2024

The painting suggests that everything is going in different directions, like a force is shoving the boats bridges and buildings. Here is a view from her studio that tells us how much she is capable of shaking things up.

This painting was done while she was in a residency in Europe. It is very funny, with the ducks heading toward the city that is ( as usual) tilted.

Flying Intersection 2018

Hyper urban 2017

Olives enjoys the visuals of computer labs led to several memorable paintings.( See left side of Lamb ).

Painting of computer lab by a river called Computer Zone. . As we look now as technology is running amok using our water resources with AI, the next generation of horror is happening but it is much less dramatically visible. And of course there are no computer labs that look like this.

Computer Lab 2017. Olive: “I thought all the wires were vast & fun resembling the denseness of NYC when I worked from the former World Trade Center. ”

Genome Lab 2007

Another theme is deluges, in which our buildings and cars float helplessly in rising waters:

here the library is flooded

The Streams Return the rivers are overruning the city as it sinks into the sea, what could be a clearer predicition of climate change!

Rapid Commute 1996-97 is another favorite of mine, rapid yes, because the water is sending the cars down the river out of control, while the buildings collapse around them

Rising Waters engulf the city

This sense of water overcoming our structures is out of control here in paintings of Manhattan, everything is shaky .

Skyscraper in Yellowstone

Skyscraper in Yellowstone is a humorous piece, putting NYC in Yellowstone. It’s like the Bison is trying to get permission to get into the condo, haha. Those are geysers on the ground behind them not water. One would be dead if one walked through the area

We can remember that Manhattan Island is small and surrounded by water. but apparently all the skyscapers were built on bedrock , so Ayhens has taken some liberties in suggesting that everything is shaky. But it makes its point!

These crowded man made structures defy logic in building so many skyscrapers in such a small space.

Olive: “When I was working from the trade center & China town that is when the dense city watercolors began. They are Zen pieces as I am totally in the now when I do them”

Downstairs Deluge 2019

Parallel Strata- the immense modernist building lays on top of, and seems to merge with, the natural landscape like a huge creature

The artist:

“Parallel Strata, this is from the Badlands in South Dakota. Frank Lloyd Wright said they are great architecture, agreed. So I placed the Bad Lands park formation merging into contemporary architecture. ”

Sometimes she looks at nature on a smaller scale

Dry River

Ezra and Suzanne’s pool

Polluted Swamp We see the green algae taking over

Olive: “in Tampa, FL there is a protected swamp in the middle of the city. It’s beautiful!. The swamp I painted was very polluted, people sunk their used cars into it.”

St Joseph Indians In the Swamp

Olive:

“Spooky New Orleans and Saint Joseph Indians in a Swamp were influenced by my residency in New Orleans through the Joan Mitchell Foundation. With Spooky N.O. I roamed the residency at night, the light was very inspiring & I thought of much danger I had been in throughout my life but they had a guard so I didnt feel felt

threatened”

Saint Joseph Indians were indigenous native Americans that work on beautiful beaded outfits in groups of different colors.”

Spooky New Orleans

Deep Time Malta

Olive has been awarded many residences. Here is a painting she did while in Malta. the urban development of all the land masses is countered by 8 underwater statues..

Olive:”Malta has tombs way under ground a 1000 years older than the Egyptian ancient structures. The little figures in my Malta piece were found in these tombs. They were not in the water. If they were they wouldn’t have lasted. I painted them submerged for visual reasons.”

Overpop Jamboree with a detail of the crowd with umbrellas. One of the rare examples of a close up crowd of people. Olive said ths was painted during Covid