Kate Kretz, Angelina Jolie. © Chelsea Galleria, Kate Kretz.
RALEIGH, N.C.- A North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line.
Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous works has garnered the attention given to "Blessed Art Thou," which was to show at Art Miami 2007 that began on Saturday.
The painting – acrylic and oil on linen – depicts an angelic Jolie in the clouds, holding her newborn daughter Shiloh with children Maddox and Zahara at her legs. Below them is a checkout line at Wal-Mart, where women wait in line. The painting is for sale through Chelsea Galleria in Miami, which represents Kretz.
With the popularity of "Blessed Art Thou," her blog, which used to average 30 unique viewers daily, is getting more attention from strangers these days with 15 000 unique views on Wednesday.
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, asked to comment about "Blessed Art Thou" on a Post blog, said the painting's message is too obvious. "It's more like a puzzle-picture than a probing work of art: Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look," Gopnik wrote. "Its van-art technique, especially, is so generic that it hardly has a thing to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before – often, much better."
