Vera Klement’s paintings say a lot about her. Step in front of one, and you’ll see how enraptured she is with the act of painting–each stroke seems to writhe on the canvas.
As a teacher, Klement saw the art of painting go out of fashion, come back, and go out again. Toward the end of her time at the U. of C., she says, she felt the pressure of being “a painter among people who no longer believed in painting. When I left, they didn’t replace me. Right now there’s no tenure-track painter on the faculty.” Ben Whitehouse, who got his MFA under Klement’s tutelage, acknowledges that “teaching painting is fraught with difficulty in the contemporary context,” mentioning the ascendance of nontraditional art forms and the belief that painting can be just one of the tricks up a multimedia artist’s sleeve. Klement’s father taught her how to do watercolors when she was 11. “Back then,” she says, “the word artist meant painter.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
She has returned to Europe, but never to Gdansk. She doesn’t want to tamper with her memories, she says, because she still draws inspiration from what she once held most valuable and dear: the sights and sounds that bind her to this place. “The memory is my muse,” she explains.
Klement attaches an almost mystical importance to landscape. Her painting The Sky Was Red With Cockcrow contains eight of them. “I paint figures and landscapes, but the figures are never in the landscapes. This sense of expulsion is probably related to losing one’s homeland and remembering it as exquisite.”
“Harold was a good friend of mine,” Klement says. “He could talk about art and aesthetics for hours, never gossip or what he knew about what this person or that person said.”
Klement struggled against the dominance of imagism in Chicago, forming a group in the late 1960s called “the Five,” with Ted Argeropolis, Larry Booth, Martin Hurtig, and Larry Solomon. “I was totally bored here,” she says, “and this group came along, and we supported each other.” Several years later she had a hand in founding the cooperative women’s gallery Artemisia.
The rules of abstract art ordained that any literary references in painting lowered it to the level of mere illustration, so Klement respected the barrier between the studio and the library–but no longer. Recently, she completed two paintings inspired by Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace of Desire, though she quickly points out that neither one is “illustration”–that is, subordinate to the writer’s imagination. She has also tried her hand at translating the work of the German and Russian poets that she reveres. The result is a manuscript titled “Born of Silence,” which she hopes will be picked up by a publisher willing to run the poems alongside reproductions of her paintings inspired by them.
