Open spaces

Jul 17 2020 - Sep 10 2020

A landscaped themed group exhibition featuring the work of: Kathy Beekman, Bruno D’Anna, Mara Manning, Jeremy Patlen, Topher Straus

Bitfactory Gallery owner and curator Bill Thomason invited five artists, Kathy Beekman, Bruno D’Anna, Mara Manning, Jeremy Patlen, and Topher Straus to exhibit landscape work that presents their distinct style. Mediums include oil paintings, photography, pastels and digital art featuring original takes on natural and urban terrain. The Open Spaces show begins with an artist reception on March 20 from 5 to 9 pm and runs through April 9, 2020. In addition to regular gallery hours, the show will also be on view during the first Art of Brunch Artwalk of 2020 on March 29^th from 11am to 3pm and during the First Friday Artwalk on April 3^rd.

Colorado artist Kathy Beekman uses no tools in her soft pastel landscape paintings, other than her fingers. Self-taught in this medium she works quite deliberately, while letting her unconscious take control and guide her creations. It steers her compositions, color choices and their placement, and tells her when a painting is finished. For Beekman, creating comes intuitively rather than intellectually. Her work is inspired by the Midwest, where she grew up and her current surroundings in Colorado.

Italian artist Bruno D’Anna creates his representational oil paintings with a palette knife, using bright, vivid colors, making bold choices in perspective, focus and most importantly, light. With his seemingly effortless ability to capture its elusive quality and how natural daylight fills in a landscape or the lights of a city falls on a cityscape, he can, in just a few strokes can transform a painting to represent a different mood.

Michigan artist Mara Manning works in cold wax and oil and a variety of mixed media including pigment sticks and oil pastels, dye stain, artgraph and more. Each painting has its own unique story whether it is one of humor or tension, real or imagined. She sometimes thinks of the paint itself as the actual subject matter causing the use of color to evolve from the painting process. While the objects often have clean-cut boundaries, they are not recognizable for the role they are playing.

For New York artist Jeremy Patlen, landscape photography is a personal and meditative practice. In places such as the open prairie or above the tree line, the light changes nearly constantly, turning the landscape into an abstract. His practice is to become calm and look deeply to find the essence of a place, then try to capture it with my camera at just the right moment. Whether traveling, documenting weddings or photographing people, he constantly seeks out the beauty that gives a place or person its intrinsic character.

The inspiration for Topher Straus’ art comes from decades of living in, and exploring Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, admiring tree-flooded valleys and silhouetted, mountain peak sunsets. His process includes modern technology and methods that result in a well-known landscape engulfed in contoured lines that superimpose the autogenous beauty of the original photograph. He takes recognizable, natural landscapes and convert them into a modern array of sharp lines—blending and contorting them up the slope of a mountain or shaping the soft, blurred lines of a waterfall. His zest for transcending established iconography makes for a unique combination of traditional vistas and modern style.

Bitfactory Gallery, located at 851 Santa Fe Drive in the heart of Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe, exhibits work by the best emerging and up-and-coming local, national and international visual artists. It strives to showcase art that may not be a good fit for other galleries. Additionally, he hosts one major or renowned artist a year, bringing new and exciting work to Denver. The Bitfactory building also houses artist studios with the vision of providing a helpful, friendly atmosphere for artists to work solo or collaborate with others. The gallery has a new partnership with Bonacquisti Wine Company and will be selling wine to patrons during the monthly First Friday Art Walk. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., and by appointment. For additional information please contact Bill Thomason at info@bitfactory.net or (303) 862-9367. www.bitfactory.net