Award-winning painter Pam Douglas launches the highly anticipated finale in a trilogy of art shows inspired by earth’s primal energies – water, fire, and air – at TAG Gallery this Tuesday.
The exhibition titled “The Life of Air” will continue through Sept. 28 featuring Douglas’ original paintings on silk.
Special events at the gallery include an artists’ reception Sept. 7 and an artists’ talk Sept. 21.
Douglas said her new works experiment with transparencies where the motion of air flows through abstracted imagery.
“I chose air to explore the subtle power within an invisible energy,” Douglas said. “I also wanted to evoke the transparencies of our time where so much of life is permeable and fleeting.”
Earlier this year, Douglas exhibited at the Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, and at the California African American Museum where she had a six-month long installation. Douglas, whose work is widely collected, has also been exhibited at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) sales and rental gallery, and in juried shows including TarFest, i-5 Gallery at the Brewery Art Complex, and The California Open.
Her 2012 solo show “The Life of Fire” was critically acclaimed by James Bae, who wrote, “These paintings are stunning tropes of singular instances… never repetitive but endlessly unpredictable… transcending the scope of traditional arguments on how nature can be represented. Like fire, they have their own way of being alive.”
Douglas said working on “The Life of Air” was a transcendent experience for her because it was an experiment with delicate materials that were new to her.
“The silk panels receive the inks and water-based mediums in different ways from canvas or other cloths, allowing colors to seep through multiple layers,” she said. “This technique creates dimensionality that is at once fragile and deep.”
In “The Life of Air,” Douglas will exhibit 11 paintings.
This series is strikingly different from the hard-edged, brightly colored pieces from last year’s “The Life of Fire,” and the dense layers of paint in “The Life of Water.”
“All the pieces created for the trilogy of primal energies are abstractions of nature,” she said. “They also have thematic similarities with my sepia work on raw linen from a few years back, as they create subtlety as well as movement.”
On Saturday, Sept. 7 from 5-8 pm, Douglas will be present at the artists’ opening reception at TAG Gallery, which will also include solo shows by two other local artists. The event is free and open to the public.
On Saturday, Sept. 21 at 3 pm there will be an artists’ talk, a discussion among the three artists. This event is also free and open to the public.
TAG Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm; and Sunday afternoons.
For more information, call TAG Gallery at 310.829.9556 or visit www.taggallery.net. For more information about Pam Douglas and her work, visit her website at www.PamDouglasArt.com.
