The Goldmark Cultural Center’s John H. Milde Gallery is proud to present Elemental, an exhibition featuring new paintings and drawings by Betsy Belcher.
The exhibition is on display in the Goldmark Cultural Center’s John H. Milde Gallery from 18 August, 2023 to 22 September, 2023.
An artist talk about the exhibition will be presented by Betsy Belcher at 2.30pm on 9 September 2023 at the John H. Milde Gallery.
An exhibition reception will immediately follow the artist talk on Saturday, 9 September 2023, from 3pm - 5pm.
About the Exhibition
I like to think of my paintings and drawings as artifacts of my active perceptual process: my experience of form and space, animated by color and gesture, and inflected by emotion and thought. I want to communicate through the materiality of whatever medium I use. I try to think physically with the paint, charcoal or pastel, without language.
I am devoted to the idea that abstraction is the authentic outcome of making art. I examine edges, boundaries, gravity, magnetism, surface, tactility, trying to find the accumulation of observations that constitutes an image.
The work in this exhibition encompasses a year of mixed media works on paper, exploring color after several years of work in a more restrained palette.
Perception is an active process that defines what the world is to each individual. My focus as an artist has always been from the inside outward. I want show what I see of the world. My paintings and drawings are my experience, animated by color and gesture, and inflected by emotion and experience. Communicating through the materials of drawing and painting, I mean to think physically with these materials.
At the outset, this work referred to the present time and the immediacy of things around me: trees, vines, natural forms, structures and changes of grade in my garden and places I move through, configurations of space in my house. But, my images are never this literal.
Fed also by my recurrent, haunting dreams of buildings and movement through topographies, the drawn and painted places began to turn into fantastical structures and landscapes. I mean these images to be abstract and to encompass the plasticity and contradiction of dream space.
I feel free to shift point of view and scale, in order to better evoke the temper of these completely conceptual places. Some are born out of my anxieties, others grown from my play with combining and trying to visualize these nonsense worlds that hold multiple contradictions. The filter of memory, places I have lived or traveled to before, visual art and literary experience all make conceptual contributions.
The larger drawings are intended to suggest environment, merging map and diagram, surface and atmosphere, passage through time and space. The newest small works are less edited and open ended searching for new ways of approaching process and subject.
I actively leave evidence of change in all these works, suggesting their revision as part of their generation: I examine edges, boundaries, gravity, magnetism, surface, tactility, distance and other elusive qualities that form the complex of apprehension of material and imagined realities. The chain of actions that makes the drawing or painting is built from the nature of the first steps, as I feel my way through the work.
- Betsy Belcher
About the Artist
Born in Texas, Betsy Belcher is a longtime resident of Dallas, exhibiting her paintings and drawings, teaching studio art, and holding the position of Art Gallery Manager for both the Haggerty Art Gallery, at the University of Dallas, and for Cedar Valley College’s Educational Art Gallery. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.
She received her B.F.A. in Printmaking from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she graduated with honors, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. She later received her M.A. in Painting, with a minor in Art History, from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and her M.F.A. in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.