Margaret Bowland

Yesterday I went to Los Angeles to see Margaret Bowland's work at the Thomas Paul art gallery. The above pastel was not included in her work, but I found it on her website and love it. I will admit, now don't chase me out of town, my initial response when walking into the gallery was "I don't like this and don't want to look at it". Well, when Peter Frank arrived I had no choice but to sit and look at her work for an hour and I have to say that in that hour I found I was really becoming comfortable with the work and finding a lot of things I'd like to imitate. I think at first I was put off by the exposed female genitalia, the strange pairing of women, black, white, though bald (model has a disease) and Latina dwarf. However, when you look at the way they are painted, and look at their faces you can really see an empathy between the artist and her models. The gallery owner told us that this little girl will often take her own poses and ask the artist, what am I, or who am I and the work goes from there. I am inspired by her work and will hope to take something from it to put in my own.

Check out Margaretbowland.com

Portraits

Yesterday my Critical theory class, with Peter Frank, met at the Scape gallery in Corona Del Mar to view the work of artist Ray Turner. Turner has painted portraits of local art collectors - for the most part on 12 x 12" pieces of glass. He then paints squares of various colors on the wall and arranges the portraits on the squares. The gallery contacts their collectors, invites them to attend a photo shoot, but tells them that just because he photographs them, does not mean he will paint them. Ah , how smart - dangling the carrot, instilling the fear of being left out... The guy knows what he is doing. The buyer chooses the background color and the gallery sends a painter to their home to paint the colored square on their wall. The portraits are very interesting. Each one is painted with colors and brush strokes unique to the sitter. He really seems to capture individual personality. There was one portrait that stuck out as not like the others. It was far too warm in tone and felt over worked - not as spontaneous as the others. The jaw line and neck appeared rubbed out. I commented on this and Peter Frank suggested that the subject may have had plastic surgery and this was the artists way of dealing with that. The gallery owner had over heard, came out and wanted to know which painting we were talking of. Sure enough, the woman painted had loved her portrait and claimed this is what she would look like after her "next" surgery. I was impressed that Frank had such a keen eye as to figure out what it was. The portraits were inspiring. I'd love to give something like that a go. Another student pointed out, that by painting on glass he was probably saving time by blowing up the images and putting the glass on top of the photos and painting directly. Hm. One can only say, why didn't I think of that first?