On November 13, Friday, Headbones Gallery opened an exhibition of works by two women artists; Robin Tewes, a mature New York artist who deals in images derived from domestic environments and Aleks Bartosik, who’s autobiographically based, narrative drawings were introduced at the opening reception with a drawing performance.

Spunky women - Tewes’ quiet resignation breaking out with military fierceness and Bartosik’s seemingly virginal demeanour kicking her heels with spirited naughtiness, ready to be frisked. Unseemly women, their work is not in keeping with standard norms of taste and form. Each is rebellious. Neither is ladylike.

Tewes brews on her boundaries, hysteria lying just below the surface of her placid rooms – a figment of her imagination or the visual documentation of her particular prison? Are the walls, corners, furniture, a private picture of a woman’s castle or an artist’s confinement? Tewes acknowledges the solitary confinement of easel painting in a living room while the child plays on the rug. Tewes is painting camouflage. There is a perverse insinuation lurking in the ordered sameness – a quiet ‘fuck you’ whispered with a sly smile of victory. Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, first published in 1869 because men went to war - a grand theme. Virginia Woolf in 1929 delivered a series of essays to two women’s colleges at Cambridge University titled A Room of One’s Own wherein she questioned whether women could write a great work for they were denied the same opportunities as men to experience the world - women stayed at home. Tewes works from home and is effective.

Bartosik is the younger generation. Messing about. Her women do all the unseemly acts that lie beneath the surface of Tewes’ brew. Rubrical acts with reddish smears as lipstick blotches. Bartosik’s bad little girl is not about to give in to a ladylike resignation. She too is caught in the examination of women’s world, the psychological range openly acknowledged - narcissist to nymphomaniac. She dons her war paint, saddles her horse, kisses her girlfriends and shows what she has been told to keep private.