Background
Olive Ayhens was born in 1943 in Oakland, Califorinia, United States.
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
San Francisco Art Institute where Olive Ayhens received Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees.
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
San Francisco Art Institute where Olive Ayhens received Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees.
Olive Ayhens was born in 1943 in Oakland, Califorinia, United States.
Olive Ayhens received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degrees at San Francisco Art Institute. An abstract painter Jack Jefferson was among her teachers.
Olive Ayhens emerged to the art scene in the early 1970s. Since then she has widely shown her artworks at many solo and group exhibitions around the United States. Ayhens creates her post-apocalyptic cityscapes in series like ‘The Aesthetics of Pollution’ or ‘Extreme Interiors’. The canvases uncover the topic of the contrast between the signs of industrial progress, like skyscrapers, expressways, gridlocks, computer laboratories or overlapping wires and prehistoric images.
Ayhens has also tried her hand as an educator teaching and lecturing at different times at such art institutions as Weber State University, California College of Arts and Crafts, the University of Texas at Austin, University of California, Brown University, Montana State University, American University, and Massachusetts College of Art, at Bennington. She has also been a visiting professor at Chicago Art Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, and at Illinois State University.
The multiple residencies Ayhens has been bestowed during her career had an impact on her canvases. So, in 2005, the artist was at Fundacion Valparaiso, Spain where she discovered Moorish architecture and work of Antoni Gaudi.
Ayhens art in New York City is represented by the Lori Bookstein Fine Arts gallery.
Olive Ayhens is an accomplished artist whose works are recognized both by art critics and art amateurs.
Ayhens’s talent in painting fantastical city scenes have been marked by many fellowships and grants, including those from the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation among others.
Ayhens’s paintings are acquired by such permanent collections as the Oakland Museum of California, West Collection and Mills College in Oaks, the Evergreen State College, and the University of Northern Iowa.
View of Three Boroughs
Downstairs Deluge
Flyway Intersection
Camelid in the City
Dumbo Dreams
Ur-Beasts
Critters and the Cathedral
Overcast Day
From the Upper East Side
Yellowstone
Unaccustomed to Winter
To My Second Birth
Crazy Woman and Calm Man
Edge City
Evanescence of Form
Aesthetics of Pollution
Interior Wilderness
The Lab
Coliseum of Chaos
Zhone
Interior Wilderness
Deep Time/Malta
Parallel Strata
Bristlecones on the Balcony
Grand Central:Inside/Outside
From the Balcony
Fancy Oldies
Cat in the Night
Ancient Fauna
Oceanic Library
Take It From the Top
Owls
Carnac
Cinnamon Rose
Remembering My Chickens
Quotations:
"My work is much involved with my love of the paint itself – with layering it, with building textures, etc. All this is striving for a sensual visual beauty. Color is my first language. I have fun with personification as well as improbabilities of scale. My work is heavily influenced thematically by my environment, both physical and spiritual."
"The paint itself is sensual and tactile; I love it like perhaps a writer might love words. I enjoy surprises in my paint handling. Color is a passion and a power – I can make it balanced or abrupt like music – whatever is needed. I do see color and shapes as I hear music."
"The experience of observing NYC from a highly elevated viewpoint is similar to studying an organism under a microscope."
"These interior themes can be very broad. The boundaries between inside and outside spaces become blurred with images intruding into and overlapping one another."
Quotes from others about the person
"In 1996 I flipped over an Olive Ayhens painting at DC Moore for its painterly facture and humorous drawing portraying a traffic jam of cars falling between rocks as if water. The serendipitous combination of real elements and imaginary landscape delighted the eye and engaged thoughts on time, place and how they are experienced and remembered."
