carol m. dupre – torpedo factory’s 2009 artist of the year

Torpedo Factory Artist of the Year
C.M. Dupre - A Mansion Owner’s Spirit
In Rhode Island, where I spent part of my childhood, it is common in the summer for families to trek out to Newport where on Bellevue Avenue, which sits atop the Atlantic Ocean, one can experience, tour, and see the many mansions curated by the Preservation Society.  At theses mansions, one can view exceptional elegance and inspiration in architecture, art, design, and landscape and I distinctly remember at age 10 or 11, visiting The Breakers (1895), one of the Nation’s greatest Gilded Age landmarks.  
 
The Gilded Age (1865-1914) was a rich and complex period in American culture.  It played a critical role in shaping the modern world marked by vast industrial fortunes, monumental architecture, and the emergence of the United States as a super world power.  Newport was the summer social society capital and families who built summer homes there were power-brokers and leaders.  In great part, they drove American art, architecture, diplomacy, and business. 
 
These summer cottages of the mega-wealthy reflect an evolution and The Breakers is arguably one of the most fantastic of these mansions –  complete with fabrics from abroad, gilded gold ceilings, and many symbols of the Vanderbilt’s social and financial preeminence gained through their industrial development of steamships, railroads, and transportation.  
 
The Breakers, now a National Historic Landmark, was a wooden-framed house destroyed by fire in 1892.  The following year, the Vanderbilt’s hired architect RM Hunt to create a 70 room, 65,000 square foot, Italian Renaissance- style palazzo inspired by the 16th century palaces of Genoa and Turin.  The five-story mansion is aligned symmetrically around a central Great Hall, and it is here that the visitor realizes they have never seen such splendor or luxuriousness and that people actually live like this, surrounded with crystal and fantastic marble, and iron gates, and wealth of every imaginable kind.  

If you were, in some imaginary world, to meet C.M. Dupre in The Breakers, she’d likely be working as the gardener out in the back shack in her jeans, with her somewhat unruly hair framing an inconspicuous yet delicate face.  (Her real-life art studio is stiflingly small and dark and noisy and disadvantaged, and yet still she manages – it’s temporal after all, and Dupre is interested in legacy, life, and love.)  And you’d mistake Dupre for BEING the gardener when she speaks calmly, thoughtfully, quietly, patiently and introspectively, but with great intellect.  Likely, it would be then that you would shockingly realize that she is not the gardener, or the servant, or the historical tour guide, but rather is the OWNER of the mansion. 
 
She’d take you to the great hall, and she’d unassumingly show you (and only after you asked), her great oil paintings and you would begin to understand that not only does she have immense wealth, but that she IS immense wealth.  A documentarian traveler only temporarily here before she goes there.  

The greatest thing about C.M Dupre is that while she’s away on these intellectual, literary, or artistic grand voyages, she’s bringing back for the viewer everything she saw, felt, thought, learned, feared, and loved.  She’s the memory of the Titantic, Earhart’s solo flight, and Marco Polo all rolled into one and you better believe it’s all on the canvas, meticulously stored for history.  And she’s sparing no expense.  There will be words and thoughts and connections you and I could never have made.  There will be symbolism, and multi-layered meanings, and foreign language, and animals, and devices, and pottery, and paint.  
 
Oh the painting.  Somber, ochre, light-filled, contrasted, carefully played, rich, deep, free-flowing, interpretive, contextual, structured, and surprising.  The painting!  That’s the real Gilded Age, when the paint, the painter, and the viewer all become instantly one, when the viewer is left with their head spinning in amazement and awe.  She’s feminism and chauvinism, she’s timeless, she’s the beginning and the end, she’s the completed thought and the finished sentence, she’s the knower and the watcher and she keeps all her jewels and all her crowning glory and all her life lessons on the canvas, where they belong for safekeeping.  

Take Canto Piagendo for instance.  Multi-layered in meaning, exquisitely detailed, and yet you can’t take your eyes off the face floating in a distant arch or surrounded by black unkempt hair.  The mother of meaning, there with an infant child, a string of pearls, and a dead bird lying on a serving platter.  Or Canto 2, a purely inspired mix perhaps of Khalo and Rivera-esque.  Central American in feel, native and traditional in execution, and unbelievable vibrancy floating above fish scales.  A wrinkled and weathered wise woman, the Mother Earth, the caretaker and the hearth.  In 21st Birthday we see the culmination of Dupre’s opposing halves, inexhaustible good versus evil.  A sad little innocent, doll-carrying jester girl in a flowered and belled petticoat on the flank of a tattooed, scarred, and pierced young urban-ghetto man casting a sideways glance in her direction.  Experience versus innocence, street versus country, life versus death, and we stare and absorb and wonder is it Los Angeles or France or something in between?  

The answer is neither.  When you start thinking you understand Dupre, think again.  Out she comes with more riches from her treasure chest, more intense, more in-depth, more telling as in Folie D’Archive, A Thousand Plateau Grid, and Transition Big Fish.  They’re playgrounds for the intellectuals, wonderlands for the artists, and adult amusement parks for the literati.  Dupre’s very wise in that she has made a distinctly clear nod to the art of the past.  She uses everything and she acknowledges the historical artifacts as they speak of their ancestry and parental origins.  
And yet, there is a soft sadness, a longing perhaps, when these works are found rolled up as new art, yet orphans, ready to be adopted, nurtured and groomed to the needs that speaks to our times.  It’s work that tackles the cultural, political, and social complexities of everyday life and it incorporates signs and symbolic motifs as illuminated manuscripts.  These works are narrative and it almost seems like Dupre would be happy to never have to tell you about her travels, she’d just rather show you where she’s been – not yet revealing the next glamorous destination.

Dupre has achieved visual ecstasy at its best and the work is far beyond the range of her counterparts.  The work goes beyond normal convention of color, composition, context, contrast – it’s work that goes beyond talent.  One wonders, am I dealing with a savant or is there something a little “off”?  It’s heady, it’s headstrong, it’s heartfelt, it’s whole, humanistic, humble, and honest.  How does she do it?  
 
Our minds are spinning and processing as we turn around to see Dantean Circles (about Epic Italian literature), Cafe Meglomania (about 30’s Berlin), and Frieze.  How does she cultivate this keen eye for current headlines and yet flourish the canvas with outpourings of bright paint and bold strokes?  How does she capture the European masters and who are her other influences?  How does Dupre cultivate these Renaissance images?  Since that day in The Breakers more than 35 years ago when I fell in love with wall to floor magnificent mirrors, I’ve yet to see anything in their realm.  The same is true of Dupre’s work.  It’s an incredibly beautiful and interesting and mind-opening adventure, and one Dupre traverses time and time again in her relationship to dimension, proportion, shape, and time.

Dupre’s work reflects in-your-face life passages that border and transcend on theatre, music, philosophy, literature, compassion and shared human experiences.  Recently, Linda Woods and Karen Dinino wrote in their book, Visual Chronicles, “The real news of our lives is not in newspapers.  We must chronicle our own adventures and achievements, our brilliant observations and our comic relief, our best friends and our greatest embarrassments. ”  
It is also said that in the Vanderbilt lineage, William Vanderbilt had a passion to discover personal interests for the pure pleasure of learning.  Dupre’s modern-day mansion owner’s spirt comprises a learning which promotes art appreciation for the marvelous diversity of her intricate and treasured mind and eyes.
Congratulations to the entire portfolio of Dupre’s work, we expect she will continue to excel and exemplify extreme accomplishment everywhere she goes.  

 

shauna lee lange arts advisory
where more art is more to love
www.shaunaleelange.com
shaunaleelange@gmail.com
2710 williamsburg str., 402
alexandria, va 22314
703.960.0616

A full service arts advisory serving metropolitan Washington DC since 2006.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “carol m. dupre – torpedo factory’s 2009 artist of the year,” an entry on shauna lee lange

Published:
January 10, 2009 / 12:13 pm
Category:
Uncategorized
Tags:
, , , , , , , ,