Vicki Chelf & The Art of Antifascism

“I used to think that every kid had the same kind of nightmare,” says Vicki Chelf.

And she’s not at all talking about the many still life paintings crowding the walls around us, of dolls and dinosaurs and all sorts of toys looking forlorn and forgotten in the corner of an early 20^th century crime scene, painted voyeurs all demonstrating a high degree of skill and varying levels of creepiness.

No, she’s talking about the nightmares that plagued her childhood. The same nightmare, manifesting again and again, changing its clothes but never losing its general shape. In it, she’s pursued, running and hiding from crazed soldiers and stormtroopers armed with more than guns but with authority. Sometimes she’s in a forest; sometimes an old house. The where doesn’t matter but that she’s always pursued. Always terrified.

The nightmares persisted into adulthood, only disappearing 15 or so years ago. Until recently.

Chelf is in a hotel this time. A luxury resort. But she knows malevolent forces have marshalled at the door. She tries to warn the people around her but they’re all too distracted by their own little slice of paradise. No one will listen.

Not exactly the most subtle signal from the subconscious, but neither is Chelf, when asked about the motivation behind her ongoing series of portraits, Women of Resistance.

“I see a trend toward fascism worldwide,” she says. “And art is my only weapon.”

Chelf is standing by the easel, a nearly finished portrait of a young woman staring out at us. The woman in the portrait holds a sitar in both hands and hints of a mischievous smile on her face. She floats in monochrome upon a collage of hand-drawn illustrations from an old French magazine.

“A face tells a lot,” says Chelf. “I see her intensity, her strongheadedness, but also her integrity and her sweetness.”

Her name is Noor Inayat Khan and she was a British resistance agent working in Nazi-occupied France as a wireless radio operator. She was executed by the Nazis at age 30.

Khan marks the latest in Chelf’s Women of Resistance series—a growing collection of painted portraits upon collage, commemorating some of the iconic women who fought the forces of fascism at a time when they could have easily looked the other way.

The project began, fittingly enough, with a trip to France and a waterlogged discovery in the basement of an old house in the town of Aubin. There, Chelf found a whole trove of old magazines—an illustrated weekly from the Catholic Church called "Le Pèlerin"—slightly soggy and probably smelling a little funny, but all full of intricate hand-drawn illustrations. “They were so gorgeous,” she says. “And so odd.” The previous owners of the house had collected them religiously and so Chelf nabbed the stack covering from 1912 to 1959.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with them until the next day, when she visited a small museum dedicated to the French Resistance, run by an old woman whose mother had fought the Nazis a lifetime ago. Within three minutes, Chelf was sobbing. And in that old mining town, in the shadow of a Roman fort and 20^thcentury tragedy, Chelf knew what her next project would be.

Returning to her studio in Sarasota, she began to paint.

There’s Josephine Baker, the Jazz Age icon and Parisian sensation, who assisted the French Resistance during the war and even took her show on an international tour so that she could spy for the Allies, personally sneaking notes through checkpoints by hiding them in her underwear.

There’s Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress turned American film star, who, hearing how American radio-controlled torpedoes were being jammed and jarred off course by the Nazis, worked with her pianist to invent a frequency-hopping guidance system that would stymie such efforts. (The Navy was less than receptive at being told its business by a woman and the National Inventors Council rejected her too—but Uncle Sam had no problem pocketing the $343 million she raised in war bonds. Today, her invention provides the basis for Bluetooth and GPS technology.)

And Andrée Peel, who joined the Resistance and went from running a beauty salon to waving torches at night to guide allied planes down onto clandestine airstrips and help the pilots escape; Nancy Wake, the journalist from New Zealand who smuggled Allied airmen out of enemy territory and then parachuted back into occupied territory to spy for the Allies; and Lee Miller, the model-turned-photographer who documented the liberation of Paris and the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald.

Chelf captures them all on the canvas, softly lit as though ready for the silver screen, memorialized as classic heroes in the Old Hollywood style. A Ringling College grad and student of the Southern Atelier, she works in the traditional grisaille technique over an acrylic primer, painting her portraits using only raw umber and white. And only oils. “You can get a lot more of a refined look with oil paint,” she says. “Less raw and more classical."

Color comes later, applied in a series of glazes that hint at the desired color—maybe a blue for the eyes, some red for the lips—and brings it forth in layered luminosity. “I’m going for an old photograph look,” Chelf says, which sometimes means applying the glaze while the paint is just a little bit wet, for a more muted aesthetic.

Centered over a collage of pages from "Le Pèlerin," the period-appropriate illustrations provide both aesthetic and historical context, while additional elements painted in by Chelf—a bomb falling from Lamarr’s hands, an illuminated Eiffel Tower, or a splash of bright color as a backdrop—keep the whole operation from becoming something dour. There’s celebration in the commemoration, and the work can be serious without necessarily being solemn.