Just like a good wine can complement a strong cheese, sometimes it’s just plain luck when two completely distinct and opposite artists can team up for a show that works as well as this.
People and Places is just such a show but you’d never have guessed it by considering Angela Morgan and Karen Bishop’s pieces separately. The former has been represented by Art Beat Gallery for years now and she’s a fixture there with her eye-popping caricatures filled with colour and bursting with life. The latter is new to the scene here but her watercolour images of the diverse Alberta landscapes are tranquil delights. They should fit in well with the other pieces just as much as Bishop herself is a great pair for Morgan.
“I’m an Art Beat virgin,” Bishop laughed, still obviously pleased with how the show is going so far. She learned about the gallery through Saeed Hojjati, a friend and recent Art Beat addition, and it didn’t take long before she was introduced to its owners, Eric and Sandra Outram. “I was talking to them one day and she called me up and said, ‘Would you like to bring your stuff for the August ArtWalk?’ Being an artist you never say no, right?”
It’s good she said yes even though she’s never met Morgan. There wasn’t any collaboration either to determine a theme or figure out which pieces would work together for a cohesive exhibit. That was left up to Sandra, but it seems more like one great random stroke of genius. What the viewer gets is like a night and day experience: a little bit of peace and then some hot and lively numbers to send you on your way.
Morgan’s body of work always seems to take place in the middle of a summer heat wave. Her characters are composed of pure, bright colours. They aren’t strict figurative representations, mind you, but really powerful emotional studies. It’s a far cry from where she started as an artist.
“It was quite tight, quite representational. More like a photograph, I guess. That was almost 16, 17 years ago … thinking that I wanted to paint people, to make them look real. It wasn’t quite what I wanted and I gradually got a little bit looser, my paintings got a little bit more gestural and I tried to get more movement into the paintings. I always wanted to paint people but I wanted to express them in a way that’s fun and whimsical.”
The results are hot and make for great pick-me-ups. It has to be tough to stay blue when you’ve got a Morgan in front of you.
“It’s a lot of fun painting them. That’s what I want.”
She said the overwhelming response from the public is that her work makes people happy.
“It reminds them of things that make them happy which is the same for me. I have these paintings in my house too and I still find them fun to look at.”
