St. John's Art Gallery - Current Exhibit

May-June, 2009

 

Spirit, Place and Person:

Journeys Through Time and Space 

Artist Reception: Friday, May 1, 2009, 5:30pm – 7:30pm

Free and open to the public.

Gwen Bowers, Deborah Bowman and Karen Poulson are seasoned travelers who bring different cultures to life through their art. Journeys, both physical and spiritual, are at the heart of this exhibit.

 

Gwen Bowers, Guatamalen Girl

 

Gwen Bowers

Oils
Email Gwen

 

Born in London during WWII into a family of artists, Gwen embraced her Father’s medium early in life. He was her first critic and the one who kindled in her a desire to harvest memories of people and places she encountered through world travel by rendering them in oil on canvas. Gwen seeks to conjure the atmosphere of foreign places in order to give others “a sense of being there.” She says her art is a “journey of love” since her primary goal is to elicit from those who see her paintings a strong sense of empathy and compassion for her subjects.

Guatemalan Girl presents a child’s profile as she quietly contemplates the water. The child’s expression suggests that she is older than her years. Does the water conjure memory, serve as the palette for her imagination, or simply instill a sense of calm?

---

 

Deborah Bowman, Friendly Protector

 

Deborah Bowman

Photographs

Web link: www.luminousbudda.com

Email Deborah

 

Deborah Bowman, author, psychologist, Gestalt therapist, and professor at Naropa University, has honed her craft as a photographer and writer for thirty years. Friendly Protector is an image that appears in her most recently published book, The Luminous Buddha: Image and Word. Deborah derives artistic inspiration from several spiritual traditions, primarily, however, from Tibetan Buddhism. As an artist, her two Italian teachers, sculptor Franco Prosperi in Assisi and photographer Massimo Bassano in Boulder, had the most profound influence on her work. She has exhibited in galleries in several western states.

The collection in her latest book reflects Deborah’s journey as an artist:

Capturing the imagination in a photograph is a practice of mindfulness. Each step demands patience, energy and awareness. . . . Photographing sacred iconography in Asia, my subjects are my teachers. Monolithic sculptures of the Buddha in meditation teach me serenity and strength. Figures of the Bodhisattva Kwan Yin, offer her compassion and grace. The many unknown artists who have tooled these statues are my inspiration, offering their subtle artistic renderings to so many across the centuries.

Deborah’s subjects are ancient and provide an awareness of the transitory nature of life since many spiritually inspired objects have vanished over time. They have been destroyed by political or religious fervor and by natural disasters. Deborah’s photographs are an attempt to salvage what color and beauty remain. Friendly Protector appears on an ancient temple in Thailand, Wat Arun. Paradoxically friendly, yet fierce, these protector figures form the mosaic of the fesod. A worshipful devotee has placed a garland of flowers on this figure as an offering.

---

 

Karen Poulson, Arachaic Head 1

 

Karen Poulson

Acrylic mixed media on paper and giclee prints
Email Karen

 

 

Karen’s father launched his daughter into artistic exploration by preserving her scrapbook of paper dolls. She had dismembered and reanimated them into utterly individual forms he found unique and intriguing. As artist and anthropologist, Karen is a compulsive traveler and finds inspiration from observing the global community through the “filter of prehistory”. In this collection, she is again deconstructing and reconstructing her subjects. She has created a series of defaced and altered heads, a kind of imaginary portraiture. She pursued the collection after reading that the Vikings and other warriors sometimes “beheaded captives believing the head is the repository of power.”

In Archaic Head I, as with other pieces in the collection, Karen makes an effort to reveal the “hidden face” by manipulating the image –“deforming, obliterating, masking” it to affect a “loss of boundaries”. Her goal with this series is to convey that ancient perception of power and explore “the possibilities and limitations of both the viewer’s and the artist’s relationship with the human face.” Karen’s intuition leads her to create “neo-artifacts that simulate the erosion and cumulative qualities of the passage of time”. She evokes for viewers of this collection a timeless journey to the heart of the human psyche.

An accomplished artist, Karen has exhibited throughout the United States since 1977.