Robert Bigelow - A&B Drawings

A follow-up to his recent series of more than two-hundred obsessive Red Blue Black Bic pen drawings, Robert Bigelow continues his freestyle mark-making explorations this time using ink marker pens. Sub-doodled pastels and organic free-flowing forms add depth to his retro pop California funk style of the 70’s.

 

Born in Los Angeles, California, Robert Bigelow graduated in 1967 from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He collaborated on print editions with Josef Albers, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Tony Onley, Man-Ray and Frank Stella. In Montreal, he was Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal (1978-95) where he pioneered safe printmaking methods. He now lives in Vancouver, Canada.

 

Bigelow's works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Pasadena Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum.

Sangito Bigelow - Prints

With the bravado of bold colors born of a graffiti practice and a conversation with design through his music, Sangito's imagery is as current as his latest infusion of youthful exuberance.

 

Sangito Bigelow, pop and street-visual savvy, brings the advantage of a cultural upbringing to the fore in his printmaking. The youngest son of Robert and Marie Bigelow (both artists), he is currently working and studying in Vancouver BC.

 

At home in cultural diversity, Sangito Bigelow is a founding member of the Zimbabwean Mamba, Afro Cuban band Kutapira, a band whose West African rhythms, reggae, samba and jazz, all contribute to a fusion of styles intelligently selected, seamlessly blended and produced by his brother Myles Bigelow.

Ruth Waldman - Mellifluous

Hailing from New York, Ruth Waldman charms with biological imagery as she tells tales with a visual vocabulary set in a surrealist space. Biomorphic creatures cavort with animated vegetation, wisping and wending their way across the virgin expanse of pure white paper.  The coloured pencil fantasy describes mutations between the floral and sinuous. It is the fronds and ferns of woodlands translated into a more designed order than the divine had devised. In bright pastels, wriggly things play within a dreamy perspective as Seuss-like illustrated botanicals, futuristic aliens and beings of otherness are distilled through tubes to burst into bloom.

e Feught

 We look towards the far distant for a sense of something other than the hum-drum existence that often takes over our routine lives. Vacations, videos, reading, music – all become the escape routes to enrichment. Afar Per se fulfills the wanderlust and slakes the thirst for exoticism, transferring a National Geographic mind frame into the refined halls of high culture.

 Amar from Afar is actually residing and working quite close for his studio is in Lumby, BC – yet that fact could translate into a rather exotic imagining for a New Yorker. Headbones Gallery visited the artist’s studio in the fall and were rewarded with a revelation as expanding as that of visiting another country. Amar’s work is not static. It reaches backwards in time as it projects forward and seldom is there only a surface meaning. But this is not a plea for nostalgia or even a reinforcement of exotic otherness for Amar doesn’t let the image rest. He pokes at it, jabs at it with the dissonance of virtual life and in doing so pulls his visual story line into the theatrical realms. There is a taste of intrigue, plot, climax and even the potential for a narrative resolution. He gives us sufficient clues but doesn’t reveal the ending.

 Diane Feught’s actual past, present and future have rarefied beginnings. Feught grew up in an Anglican home. As an adult, she lived in a Buddhist priory in Edmonton for seven years where she experienced the lush overlap of philosophical, spiritual and cultural diversity while still living in the heart of a ‘typical’ Canadian milieu. Her oil paintings and gouaches leave room for study as well as speculation as to their narrative source. Often with a strong composition that supports the drama of the imagery, her technique – impeccable and practiced – supports the strangeness of her subjects by granting an immediate viability to the juxtaposition of elements. The overwhelming perfection and balance take over any doubt at the unusual imagery. Feught also backs her innuendos with information, detailing with a precision to provoke applause.

 Afar Per se - what does it mean? Per se does not only mean “intrinsically” but also, “by, of, for or in itself”. It seems a fitting description of the works of Amar from Afar and Diane Feught with all of the allusions to otherness that they inspire.

 The opening reception for Afar Per se is Friday, November 11, which is Remembrance Day and 11/11/11. Even the date is fittingly evocative yet cryptic.

 Trance and Nilt to cosmic Eastern sounds and melodies during the opening reception with Daniel Stark on sarode, Bill Boyd on cello and Gaz on guitar.