“Because I’m not a mathematician, when I hear them they sound like poetry almost. Heck says she also enjoys the definitions of the mathematical forms. One of her paintings pictures a girl at the well with a nautilus, rather than a vase. “I really love these growth forms because they make these beautiful natural shapes that we can recognize in the natural world but also that really aren’t exactly in the world.” Like this is how a nautilus gets made, where you start in the center and then you spiral out one segment, one segment. “You get these new shapes in math you were really familiar with in other contexts. Ellen Heck, “Julia Vase – Pearl,” 2021, oil on panel, 53 x 33 inches. “It’s just this interesting form that’s both abstract and also looks like a vase at the same time. “But you don’t necessarily have to know that right off the bat,” Heck points out. In her Bouguereau-inspired paintings, however, the vases are made from Julia sets, another type of mathematical function. She has also depicted the mathematical shape called a Klein bottle, which is included in some the works in this show. In previous works, she has used a Möbius strip - a figure that looks like a ribbon with only one edge. In recent years, Heck said she has developed a fascination with mathematical forms, things that are “maybe more interesting or abstract - just things that don’t exist in the real world but we can make these models of them in math.” So “instead of having the figure next to the objects, the vessel-like object, now the figure has been replaced by that object and it’s a new object,” she says. Unlike the Bouguereau painting, in Heck’s versions the girl is not a ways next to the vessel, but rather behind it. “And that process led me to both thinking about metaphor and looking at other forms that were vessel-like but had different properties.” “I was just looking at that metaphor and then thinking about vessels, and just metaphor in general,” Heck says.
Most of the paintings in ‘Cornucopia’ are explorations of different versions of the Bouguereau painting. (Bouguereau image courtesy Wikipedia Commons Heck image courtesy Wally Workman Gallery). Do I feel okay about loving this painting? As the project developed, I started asking ‘What could I change in this painting and still like it?’” At left, William Adolphe Bouguereau’s “The Broken Pitcher” (1891), and, at right, one of Ellen Heck’s contemporary takes on Bouguereau “At the Coast with a Nautilus” (2021).
“Part of the reason I started this project was that I wanted to unpack that a little bit to see why do I love Bouguereau’s painting.
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