Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman’s “Heavy Water” recently opened last week at La Luz de Jesus. The exhibition will be open to the public through October 27th with a special artist’s talk and walkthrough with Genie Davis who will be moderating on Sunday, October 20, 2-4 PM.
Sullivan-Beeman creates beautiful, dramatic and dream-like art that births visuals of young women who drift between innocence and their awaking. As a self-taught contemporary surrealist painter she has chosen the medium of egg tempera, a medium popular in the 14th century, to paint he subjects in lavish romantic settings of metaphorical dreamscapes with a mix of representational art and feminine surrealism of fantasy or whimsy she likes to call “Magical Realism.” Her painting is steeped in message but buried in haunting and mythical beauty that proves luminous and enchanting, speaking their secrets to the viewer’s eyes.
Sullivan-Beeman puts it this way in her artist statement: “The characters in my paintings—and their animal sidekicks, spiritual daemons—swim among my dreams. Lucid reveries hatch their personas from factors of myself and my sphere. I awaken from these dreams, valueless without a critical mass, and dive headfirst into the soup of the collective unconscious. There, in the most ancient realm of the mind, I inherit stories. Like water, I draw my girls up from the deepest well.” and in another quote, Sullivan-Beeman says: “In these works, my girls choose to use this level of immense power for creation rather than destruction.”
“Heavy Water” refers to the idea of a familiar substance like H2O being transformed into D2O, a lethal and dangerous substance that looks like water but holds lethal and undetected power. Heavy Water is essential in the process to create nuclear bombs the most powerful weapons on earth. Sullivan-Berman’s dialectic harness these “girls” made from her vivid imagination as powerful symbols of transformation and feminine power.
There will be one collaborative work “Heavy Water” exhibit with multi-media artist Gina M. Sullivan-Beeman says, “I wanted to play with scale, and have someone be able to walk into one of my paintings. I really want the viewer to experience the whole show and ‘swim’ through the art. These girls are me and I want the viewer to get better acquainted with my world.” The installation will be a six-foot seahorse sculpture set inside the La Luz de Jesus Gallery for all to explore and enjoy. This exhibition brings the luminous and enchanting world of Sullivan-Beeman’s surrealist paintings into view that is birthed out of infinite consciousness and collective thought of Sullivan-Beeman’s “Magical Realism.” Viewing hours vary at La Luz de Jesus. M-Th are 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sat are 11 AM-9 PM and Sunday is Noon-6 PM.