“Seeing the
Unseen: New Paintings from Birgitta Lapides”
Best known,
perhaps, for her colorful landscape collages, Cottonwood artist Birgitta
Lapides is also widely recognized as a painter of stunning abstract canvases of
enduring power. “Seeing the Unseen: New Paintings from Birgitta Lapides,” a
solo exhibition of new work, opens on October 7 from 5-8 p.m. at the Jerome
Artists’ Cooperative Gallery, during Jerome’s First Saturday Art Walk.
Combining a
deft eye for color and an unusual aptitude for creating ever-new approaches to
composition, Lapides’ new work displays a seemingly inexhaustible fund of novel
ideas and colors that hint at early modernists painters such as Paul Klee and
Wassily Kandinsky. “Indeed,” Lapides acknowledges, “both masterful artists have
had an influence on my work.”
“My
background as a weaver and textile clothing designer,” Birgitta recalls, “also
had an early influence on my current approach to painting. I lived for many
years in an old coastal town in southern France, where I produced and sold my
original designs of hand-woven and hand-painted garments from my shop in an old
historic building. The brilliant colors of the near-by sea, the beauty of the sky
and the deep tones of the earth along the Mediterranean entered indelibly into
my creative imagination,” she confides. “This background lives unconsciously in
my contemporary paintings.”
Lapides
first learned weaving as a young woman in her homeland of Sweden. Later, she
attended the prestigious L’Ecôle Superieur D’Architecture et L’Art
Appliqué in Brussels. After that, she transferred to Pratt Institute
in New York City where she received a degree in textile design. Even later, in
France, she studied painting at the Ecôle des Beaux-Arts in Cannes.
Currently, Birgitta
Lapides lives with her husband in Cottonwood, and has been a resident of the
Verde Valley since 1996. She shows her work at the Sedona Arts Center, at
Eisenart Innovations in Tiaquepaque, and at Zen Mountain Gallery in Jerome. Additionally,
Lapides has been a member of the Jerome Artists’ Cooperative Gallery since
January 1997, and currently shows her hand-made ear rings, hand-woven jackets
and vests, as well as her paintings at the Jerome Artists’ Cooperative Gallery.
When asked
to comment on the title of her show, “Seeing the Unseen: New Paintings from
Birgitta Lapides,” she explained, “When I’m painting my landscape collages, I
am creating an image that is in part drawn from my imagination, and in part
drawn from my experience of living in Arizona; therefore, the result is seeing
something that is both familiar and imaginative at the same time—it is seeing the
familiar differently. My abstract
paintings, on the other hand, are completely drawn from my imagination—meaning,
they are the result of a visualization process that does not begin in the
visible world—they really begin in my imagination; therefore, I’m seeing the
unseen.”
“I see
myself as an intuitive, experimental painter. I don’t want to know ahead how
the painting will look when it is finished, because, for me, painting is a
journey, a discovery, and that is what makes the process of painting so interesting
to me.”
“Seeing the
Unseen: New Paintings from Birgitta Lapides” opens Saturday, October 7, with a
reception for the artist from 5-8 pm at the Jerome Artists’ Cooperative
Gallery. Refreshments will be served.
The show runs thru November 29.
Jerome
Artists’ Cooperative Gallery 502 N.
Main Street in the old Hotel Jerome
