Los Angeles-based artist Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman’s solo exhibition “Heavy Water” is on view at La Luz de Jesus Gallery through 10/27. It is her first solo showing in two years.. This coming Sunday, October 20, there will be an artist’s reception from 2-4PM, as well as a talk and walk-through moderated by arts writer Genie Davis that begins at 3PM. Refreshments will be served.
Sullivan-Beeman is a self-taught figurative and contemporary surrealist painter who combines 14th century painting techniques and magic realism to create pieces that appear to glow from within. Celebrating the hard-earned wisdom of childhood, she depicts subjects – her “girls” – that are often young, hauntingly innocent and teetering on the border between naïveté and knowingness. She uses her personal dream journal to inspire her artwork, an overt curiosity for the bizarre and the esoteric, especially alchemy and the tarot.
In her artist’s statement for the show she says, “The characters in my paintings—and their animal sidekicks, spiritual daemons—swim among my dreams. Lucid reveries hatch their personas from factors of myself and my sphere. I awaken from these dreams, valueless without a critical mass, and dive headfirst into the soup of the collective unconscious. There, in the most ancient realm of the mind, I inherit stories. Like water, I draw my girls up from the deepest well.”
All of the new paintings in Heavy Water were executed in the time-intensive egg tempera medium for which Sullivan-Beeman is known. Egg tempera was once the medium of choice for Old Masters, but when oil paint replaced it in the early 16th century, the widely used technique became antiquated. In her dreamlike paintings, she channels into the age-old medium’s characteristically mystical qualities of illumination.
One of the new pieces to shown, Sullivan-Beeman’s “Seahorse Girl,” was recently honored as a finalist of the 14th International ARC Salon Competition. heavy Water will also feature one installation that Sullivan-Beeman created in collaboration with multi-media artist Gina M. Of it, she says, “I wanted to play with scale, and have someone be able to walk into one of my paintings. I really want the viewer to experience the whole show and ‘swim’ though the art.”
Image: “Alchemy Girl,” Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman (2019) Egg tempera and oil on aluminum panel, 17.5 x 13 inches
