diane feissel: Women Painting Women/Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, SC!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Women Painting Women/Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, SC!

Wow. How to cover the events of the last week and a half? I don’t have a sufficient supply of adjectives to describe the whole experience – I’ve just been saying “amazing” and “awesome” so frequently of late that I kind of want to slap myself. Most of all, though, I just feel super-duper lucky to have spent time in a gorgeous city, as part of work in a gorgeous show at a gorgeous gallery and to paint for a week with 11 gorgeous, talented and wickedly fun fellow painters.

I think in order to wrap my head around the entirety of the experience of the last 1 ½ weeks, I’ll have to start with the “Women Painting Women” group exhibition at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston and then in a future post I’ll have to address the subsequent “Women Painting Women” painting expedition wherein a sub-set of 12 of us artists who went in on a week-long beach house rental on Sullivan’s Island and painted up a storm. So, without further ado…

What a show!!!

50+ female figurative artists, all with incredible skills, all bringing their unique spin on the depiction of the female figure. There were so many amazing works, it would be hard to point to any one to call it my favorite… and as a bonus, many of the artists were able to make it in for the show – from California, from Illinois, from Ohio, from Arizona, from Oklahoma! We even had the work of some international artists – Scotland, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden were all represented with some truly beautiful work.

It was a sort of dream come true for the three of us who have contributed to the “Women Painting Women” blog, posting stellar figurative works by outstanding female artists in the hopes that somewhere out there in the virtual world, *someone* was taking notice of all of these talented (but often under-recognized) artists out there around the globe. This exhibition and the buzz which surrounded the exhibition mounted by Robert Lange Studios were really incredible validation of the need for exposure for all of this amazing talent. Here is a link to some of the great press the show has received, due to the efforts of Robert Lange Studios and fellow WPW founder Alia El-Bermani:
http://womenpaintingwomen.blogspot.com/p/press.html

Artists Stanka Kordic (at left) and Shannon Runquist (center)

The gallery has a great record of photos of opening night, which was PACKED. They wisely planned the whole event to coincide with the Charleston Fine Art Dealers' Association’s Annual “Fine Art Weekend” event, so the visual art scene in the city was definitely sizzling and crackling with energy (picture a strip of bacon here. I mean that in the most delicious way possible). The visiting artists in the show were warmly greeted not only by surprising numbers of art lovers in Charleston, but also by the wonderful and extremely talented artists represented by Robert Lange Studios... you can see a list of them at this link.

l-r: Cindy Procious, Rachel Constantine, Mia Bergeron, Linda Tracey Brandon, Sadie Valeri, and Kerry Brooks

I’m going to leave you with some photos of the artists with their work… it was such an enormous exhibit – really, museum-scale – that it’s difficult to record it in its entirety. Robert Lange Studios did post this video walk-through which is a rough approximation of the live experience, though.