Art Sunday: Second Edition Dark Art.

 

Annette Bezor

I am presenting a second art showcase today to go Hand in Hand with the Theme:

Dark Art.

My chosen artist is from South Australia and I am placing a link here for your pleasure to her home site and gallery. Ladies you will find a mixture of feelings embedded into Annette's Art.

Above: Question of Unity 1989.

 

Camellia Complex 1997

THE huge canvases are a riot of colour, yet the artist who painted them always wears black.

"I work with colour but I can't wear it," says Annette Bezor as her exotic, turban-wearing women gaze down from the walls.

The Adelaide-based artist has been painting women for more than 25 years, although she says she did not set out to produce feminist works.

"I was young, feminism was around, I went to the South Australian School of Art and the women's art movement there was tougher and stronger than anywhere else in Australia at the time," Bezor says. "It was just natural."

A lack of positive male role models also played its part. Bezor was estranged from her violent, alcoholic father, then in her final year of art school she was brutally raped in her bedroom.

"The rape had an incredibly negative and a positive effect," she says. "I became extremely reclusive for a year and didn't go out. I told a couple of the lecturers and they let me paint at home."

She painted in the bedroom in which she was attacked - "It was something I had to confront" - the large room allowing her to produce huge canvases.

"The timing was the key. At that time the school was hugely into abstraction rather than figurative work, but because I was working alone at home I was able to go down my own path."

That path has seen Bezor experimenting with women's faces, distorting and altering them, sometimes overlaying them with dots or graffiti-like squiggles. But they are always huge and invariably ethnic-looking, usually wearing turbans.

In her two most recent works, Mocha Java 1 and Mocha Java 2, the turban-swathed heads are laid over even larger Asian heads.

"They're still a little experimental in that I'm trying to find a way to work with overlays and textures," Bezor says. "One has had an orbital sander on it, anything to make your mark. I'm trying to find ways to disrupt and disturb the image."

Another new direction looms, and may take people by surprise. "I'm about to start painting men," Bezor says. "It's funny to talk about something I haven't actually done yet, although it's looking pretty good in my head."

There is no profound reason behind the change: "It's happened because I finally found an idea I wanted to do that involved a man. I've never purposely not painted men. In fact, I have painted a few men but they're not out there, people haven't seen them. And I've always felt I had more to say about women."

Annette Bezor's exhibition is at Harrison Galleries, 294 Glenmore Road, Paddington, until June 6

Extract above courtesy of  The Sydney Morning Herald

Blind Tension 2007 Digital print 80 x 80 cm

I hope you will look further at this very talented ladies Art Work. I think I might have discovered a gem with a very unique glimpse in to the Dark Art of The Dark Nights Of A Soul.

Art Tour Starts Here.