Wilhelmina Van Ness
I have been an amateur expert on and obsessed by Joan of Arc for most of my life. In the late 1940s and early 1950s I was trained primarily as a non-representational artist at the High School of Music and Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. I was a lesser assemblage artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after which I turned mainly to self-study and wrote essays for over thirty years. I co-translated Simone Weil: Formative Writings ( UMass Press 1987). In the mid-1990s I began the current open-ended series of mural-sized charcoal drawings and pastels on the subject of Joan of Arc. I have completed two drawings (of her capture and of a stage of her journey to meet the king she would crown) and three pastels ( a prison scene, a failed attack on Paris and her execution.) I am currently working on a fourth pastel of her hearing the "voice for the first time in her fathers garden.