A Brief History

Previously Bethany Ayres, I studied painting, drawing and design at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan; and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1998, I moved to the bay area of California where I lived and worked until 2013. My image style tells the story of learning how to draw in Detroit: a perspective style with an illustrative bent; influences from the museum next door, the DIA. Composition and materials tests were developed in Philadelphia; and a simplified description with a candy finish was well received in California. My unique, compositional process with enamel on wood panel gave me a way to work more aggressively while yielding a resilient, furniture-like result. I was a known, solo-showing artist in the Bay Area, represented by Esteban Sabar Gallery at the apex of Oakland’s art scene, and winning “Best Artist of the East Bay” from the East Bay Express 2007 “Best Of” edition. My work was shown in two and three person exhibits in Oregon, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento; and group shows in those aforementioned cities plus Marin and many others on the West Coast; with occasional invitations to group exhibits in New York and Philadelphia.

Through the timeline of my image making, there is a progression from early emphasis on simple gestalt and then a transition into more storytelling with more interesting perspectives. This is partly owed to paint availability: Plastikote made a type of craft enamel available in a color spectrum that had just enough limits and was sold at my favorite, 24 hour variety store, Longs Drugs. The enamel worked perfectly with my process and the years of its availability that overlapped my time in Oakland were years of great painting, great production, and a time of falling into illusionistic development that I reflect upon fondly.

My studio in San Diego County has enabled the use of sprayed enamel instead of brushed. The sprayed paint has an effect of gradation that already imitates light captured by photograph, which I mean to exploit with thin, brushed acrylic paints to get the look of rendered form. The compositional approach to painting is the same - the preparatory process plans the composition and commits colors to large areas - but the allowance into illusion has more depth and more storytelling. I see this as a path to combining concepts and feelings of gestalt into depth of storytelling previously unavailable. I want to capture the feeling of immediate registration, while still enabling the image to unfold itself at the viewers’ own pace.

It is my fondest wish to pass the torch of my process to anyone else, so that they may similarly find greater illusionistic and conceptual depth through compositional planning. Classes offered through my website begin with simple projects and work towards this.