Magic Realism & the Collective Unconscious: Painter Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman’s Solo Show “Heavy Water”
“Heavy Water,” a solo exhibition of new work by Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman, opens on Friday, October 4 at La Luz de Jesus Gallery with an artist’s reception from 8-11PM. Pictured is “Alchemy Girl” (oil and egg tempera on aluminum panel, 17.5” x 13”).
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.
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.”
Regarding the show’s title, she says, “Heavy water—the rarest and most dangerous substance on Earth—is made from ordinary tap water. Were heavy water to suddenly replace the water coming from your tap, you would not notice any difference while cooking, drinking, or bathing. Synthesized by partially or wholly replacing hydrogen with the isotope deuterium, turning H2O to D2O, this lethal liquid is a stepping stone towards nuclear power and the atomic bomb. In these works, my girls choose to use this level of immense power for creation rather than destruction.”
www.sullivanbeeman.com
