Featured Artist: Jean Bedrosian
AD ART SHOW 2018 artist Jean Bedrosian shares a bit about her fine art and how her professional career may influence her art.
"Hovering Spirit" by Jean Bedrosian. Available now on Artsy.
What role do you see the Internet playing in the art world?
The internet allows us to promote ourselves as artists outside the gallery system. In the past, we were limited to a physical space and the gallery owners were the barrier that we needed to overcome. Now, we can create our own brand awareness, distribution channels, and audiences.
Do the skill sets artists acquire working in advertising/marketing inform their fine art aspirations? For you personally?
For me, I have learned how to distill ideas into the most impactful messages and images. However, I believe that my fine arts training, which occurred before my years in advertising and marketing informed the latter to a greater extent. My training as an artist gave me the skills to think abstractly, outside the box, and creatively.
"Rising Mist" by Jean Bedrosian. Available now on Artsy.
Does working in advertising/marketing influence the way you create art?
My artwork is quite opposite of the work I do in digital marketing. The themes of my paintings are rooted in the tradition of abstract expressionism. Whereas communicating an abstract idea is mutual between marketing and fine arts, my work diverges in that it is about putting down marks on a surface. It's about the physicality of the artwork and expressing feelings and ideas through color, line, and shape that doesn't seek to promote a product or service.
My fascination has long been with the curves and shapes in nature. I spent a significant amount of time drawing the human form, which informed by abstract painting. Curves or relationships between shapes, that mirrored the proportions of the human figure, appear within the layered strokes in my paintings.
"Carving Waters" by Jean Bedrosian. Available now on Artsy.
More recently, my paintings have explored water, wind, clouds, and skyscapes. These natural forms continued to be abstracted and combined in ways that don't appear in nature. Instead, they have come to express and communicate my spiritual beliefs. My joy and wonder at the majesty of skyscapes, and particularly cloud formations, has recently invigorated my paintings. It has allowed me to pursue the un-named colors and forms, the layering of thick and thin that has the ability to reveal and obscure. These are themes that I am excited to continue to explore.
However, I appreciate how my work life and creative life diverge such that I have the opportunity to explore distinct sides of myself, both the analytic and the expressive.
