Kate Gartrell's Artist Lecture

I attended Kate Gartrell's artist lecture about her experiences in the art world. She had really interesting things to say about her inspirations for her work. I really enjoyed her explain the relationships between bull fighters and dancing, and how that influenced several of her paintings. I also liked her experimentation with distorting the sexual nature of her figures- like having a males arm on a female torso. She explained that it was a study inspired by Michelangelo, who used male models for all of his figures in the Sistine Chapel paintings.

I found her paintings to be different from what I normally consider a painting to be. She did a lot of strategic figure cropping that I found interesting. She had several paintings where the figures head was missing in part or in total, and many that were just from the waist down. I thought it was a different take on the average, run of the mill self portrait. It was an enjoyable and enlightening lecture.