12 Nov Anna Weyant Paints Model Kaia Gerber for 'Vogue' Cover

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/anna-weyant-paints-model-kaia-gerber-for-vogue/

The magazine’s feature story on the young painter disclosed some surprising details about her life and work, including paintings kept in the tub and a penchant for rock climbing videos.

Fashion designer Marc Jacobs asked 29-year-old Anna Weyant to paint 23-year-old model Kaia Gerber for the December issue of Vogue, which he guest edited.

‘I love Anna’s women, and I love the idea of Kaia seen by Anna—I wanted a young woman looking at a young woman,’ Jacobs told Vogue‘s Dodie Kazanjian.

The portrait shows Gerber, daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford, leaning on the sill of a glassless window. Her cornflower blue dress pops in a composition stripped of greens and reds. As in much of Weyant’s painting, the whites are yellowish—as if tinted by aged varnish, a nod to the centuries-old works of Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt, whom she came to via contemporary portrait painter John Currin.

Talking about the Vogue commission, Weyant said, ‘I was pretty terrified going into it, not of her, but I was worried we wouldn’t get the image. I was just a little nervous because I tend to gravitate toward fuller faces.’

Born in Calgary to a corporate lawyer father and a mother who sits on Alberta’s highest court, Weyant began her career showing with 56 Henry in New York. She showed with Blum & Poe briefly before being picked up (both professionally and romantically) by Larry Gagosian.

The seven paintings in Weyant’s solo show at Gagosian in November 2022 sold for prices ranging from U.S. $450,000 to over $1 million. That same month her painting Loose Screw (2020) sold at Christie’s for $1.5 million, approaching her record price of $1.6 million, which was set at Sotheby’s in May 2022.

Gagosian and Weyant have since broken up—she’s now dating a country singer—but she remains on the gallery’s roster.

When Weyant and Gagosian split in March, she moved into an apartment on Fifth Avenue where she paints in the dining room. To save space, she stores finished paintings in the bathtub.

Working hard to prepare paintings for her show in London, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves (8 October–20 December), she confessed, ‘right now, I’m not having so much fun with painting because I’m exhausted, but when I’m in a good place, painting is the most fun I can have.’

Kazanjian said Weyant works slowly, with each painting taking at least a month. When she needs a break from her easel, she jogs around Central Park, watches rock climbing videos featuring Alex Honnold and Jimmy Chin, or goes to the closet to ‘look at my shoes, take a deep breath, and leave’.

In the leadup to the exhibition, she did allow herself one night off, hiring a helicopter to attend a fancy-dress dinner in Rhode Island. —[O]

Source Credit:  Content and images from Ocula Magazine.  Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/art-news/anna-weyant-paints-model-kaia-gerber-for-vogue/