Grande Vague Noire
June Wayne
Tapestry
106 X 73 in. (269.2 x 185.4 cm)
Cotton, wool, and wool with additional fibers.
EA 1 (two examples extant),1974.
NOTES
Woven by Pierre Daquin (born 1936) at Atelier de Saint Cyr. This tapestry is based on the lithograph Black Tidal Wave, published in 1973
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
MB Abram Galleries, 2018; David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, 2013; Art Institute of Chicago, 2010; Neuberger Museum of Art, 1997 (illus.); Occidental College, 1980; Art Expo West, 1980 (illus.); Pomona College, 1978; Franco' American Institute, 1978 (cover illus.),' Rubicon Gallery, January 1977; Van Doren Gallery, 1976; Artemisia Gallery, 1975; Van Doren Gallery, 1974; Art Institute of Chicago, 2010
COMMENTS
"As an artist how do you make a wave look like its towering above? How do you get that verticality? How do you get that vividness? That is a real problem, a technical and aesthetic problem. I did it by literally making the waves stand up, which meant carving an edge on one side. Because if you think about waves, they go on forever. And you look at a wave which is very tall and it has diminished into the vanishing point. It vanishes. I had to go against that somehow. And this idea of having a wave come up like that, as though it were in a plume, is mostly contrary to reality, and yet I had to make it so convincing that you accept it even though you know it is absurd.”
—June Wayne in video conversation with MB Abram at Wayne’s Tamarind studio in 2009.
Here, as in several other images, Wayne plays with the similarity between the tree rings taken from a parquet floor and the curling forms of the wave. She found great delight in the conjunction of wood and water, static and dynamic, man—made and natural. In his 1974 Craft Horizons article on her tapestries.
“It was...a natural step for Wayne to move into the tapestry idiom, because, like the lithograph, its effectiveness develops through the interaction of materials affecting form. She has observed it this way: "No matter how farfetched the vision, materials themselves are important in their is-ness; their organic given nature reveals and contributes to the whole."
—Bernard Kester, as quoted in A Catalogue Raisonné 1936-2006, June Wayne - The Art of Everything” by Robert P. Conway.
Please also see the lithograph Black Tidal Wave.
