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Wanna read the latest
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| Art Exhibit:
Ann Bernauer, interview by Diannek |
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Ann was born in Salinas, California and spent her childhood in the Salinas Valley, John Steinbeck Country. The memory of the simple land forms, fields of rich earth with produce and soft rolling hills are reflected in her present landscape work. She graduated from Stanford University with a degree in art history and later spent five months in Europe -- traveling, studying in museums, and visiting art collections. She married and when her children began school, she worked as a volunteer at the Oakland Art Museum and in the Marin County Schools' art program. She continued her technical art training after her graduation but didn't become a working artist until later in her life. When lunch was over we drove to her studio, a space that she shares with two other artists. On the right is a photo I took of her work space. I was struck by the artistic feeling that was present even in the way she organized her equipment. |
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Ann is preparing for a gallery show. She showed me several examples of her present work, which has been described as "referenced landscapes." Ann's images are created with oil pastel on watercolor paper. Repeated layering and blending of the pastel combined with washes of turpentine produce a rich, special quality from which her landscape forms emerge. |
 Ann's work space |
Ann's professional career began in the l970s. She is uncertain of the date but she remembers the way she felt at the time. She says it was like a personal revelation. She explains it this way: I wanted to create something using my own hands to describe the way I was feeling, beyond the academics of art. I distinctly remember looking at a Vogue Magazine. It was upside down and the images evoked something different to me from what the magazine had intended. That was the beginning of my journey as an artist. I tried to capture that feeling by making collages. It was my personal revolution. I needed to express my independence through those first collages. |
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Stone Portrait: Introspection, one of Ann's early pieces, is part of her stone-combine collage series. It features a woman's head nearly hidden behind a number of stone-like shapes. She refers to these shapes and the process she used to create them, as a build-up -- like building walls and tearing walls down -- in a metaphorical sense. In 1982 Ann received an artist-in-residence grant at Briarcombe Foundation in Bolinas, California. Receiving the grant served as an affirmation of her art and also provided the needed incentive and encouragement to further develop her artistic pursuits. |
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I asked Ann what Limantour meant, and she explained that it was
the name of a beach area in the Marin headlands, but she pointed out that she uses these
simple landforms as a "language" to create a sense of expectation, renewal and
change rather than an actual physical location. |
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In Ann's words: My depiction of the landscape is The special presence of each I have used oil pastel with |
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