by Alec Clayton for OLY ARTS
Megan Bailey is an art student at The Evergreen State College. Allsorts is a private gallery operated out of the home of Lynette Charters Serembe and John Serembe. The painter and gallery match up for a short-run exhibition of Bailey’s most recent paintings. Lynette Serembe, an artist in her own right, puts it succinctly: “Megan’s work is beautiful … with an edge.”
Bailey brings the most mundane of subjects — flowers and other everyday objects — to vivid life with house paint and charcoal and paper. Her style of drawing and painting is intentionally crude. Typically, she’ll draw clear-glass vases with a few lines in charcoal or paint, create shadows by smearing charcoal, and paint the flowers with latex paint, in many instances layered and applied with thick impasto and scratched with a stick or the back of the brush handle. More often than not, she’ll crumple bits of old newspaper and stick them to the canvas and paint over them to create three-dimensional or bas-relief flowers.
Her colors are raw, mostly primary. She eschews background imagery and places her objects on solid-colored backgrounds. Some of the paintings are done in sections. For example, one is in four sections, each section a differently colored square, with objects such as a cigarette pack, a paint can with globs of paint dripping out and lemons sitting on top of the four squares.
Lynette notes that Bailey’s paintings do not photograph well and might not look good from a distance, but are excellent when viewed up close. Openings at Allsorts Gallery are always fun social events with lots of food and drink.
What: Megan Bailey
Where: Allsorts Gallery,
2306 Capitol Way S, Olympia
When: 5-7 p.m., April 27-29;
WHEN 5-7 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, April 27-29;
4-6 p.m. Sunday, April 30;
opening reception5-7 p.m. Thursday, April 27
How much: free
Learn more: 360-254-6220 | Allsorts Gallery on Facebook