Audrey Ushenko facts for kids
Audrey Ushenko (born in 1945) is an American realist painter who creates pictures of people and things, usually using oil paints. She teaches drawing and painting as a professor at Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Audrey Ushenko's Early Life and Schooling
Audrey Ushenko was born in Princeton, New Jersey. She studied art and earned a painting certificate from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964. She also studied English literature and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University Bloomington in 1965. Later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in painting from Northwestern University in 1967. In 1978, she completed her studies with a doctoral degree in art history, also from Northwestern University.
Audrey Ushenko's Art and Style
Audrey Ushenko has shown her artwork in more than 20 solo exhibitions. She has also taken part in many group shows with other artists. Her paintings are represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York City.
Ushenko's background in English literature has influenced her art. She also gets ideas from Greek mythology, old paintings from the 1600s and 1700s, and everyday social interactions. She often uses light and shadow in her paintings. This technique gives her work an impressionist style, making them look like a moment caught in time.
Art critic Gerrit Henry called Ushenko "a master chronicler of realities." This means she is very good at showing both big and small details of life. He also noted that she can make even everyday objects seem lively. Sometimes, Ushenko paints herself in her artworks. She says she does this mostly because it's convenient, not to tell her own life story.
Ushenko often paints groups of people in their real surroundings. She wants to explore how people interact with each other and with the world around them. She often paints the same model in different poses. These poses might even be opposites. For example, one person might be in shadow while another is in bright sunlight. This shows a sense of two different sides or ideas. In many of Ushenko's paintings, it looks like something has just happened or is about to happen.
Ushenko says that the meaning of her art develops as she paints. She doesn't always plan it all out from the start. For example, in her painting Vanitas VIII, there seem to be five images of Ushenko in one room. This painting seems to show that each person has many different sides or "faces" that they show, sometimes even in a single day.
For her painting at the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine, Ushenko was inspired by the "human drama" happening there every day. She wanted to create a painting to show this. Patients and staff at the hospital could watch her paint. Many of them were even included in the large, three-story artwork.
