Gail Factor
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW more for her own personal training, to develop her understanding of anatomy and the human form. If you view her oeuvre over a timeline, you can witness how this training was subtly encoded into her landscapes, both in the dynamics of shape and of color.
One of the elements that clearly separate each period of my mother’ s career is change in her physical and emotional environment. Although her many travels were always an inspiration, her pieces were generally reflective of where she was living at the time, where she harnessed visual energy from her surroundings. For example, the calm, rolling mountainous paintings of the 1980’ s were created during a very serene time for her personally and in a beautiful and scenic area in northern California. In the 1990’ s, she made a geographic shift to the desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico; this was concurrent with a major life change, the challenge of the emotional turmoil of her divorce. The impact is imprinted in her work- the transformation in the representation of land, her handling of shape and color.
Ms. Factor was a versatile artist and her approach reveals an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between abstraction and figurative: we would suggest to our readers to visit http:// www. gailfactor. com in order to get a synoptic view of her work. In the meanwhile, would you like to tell our readers something about the evolution of Ms. Factor ' s style? In particular, would you shed light on her usual process and set up?
The best approach to comprehending my mother’ s work is linear. Seeing her pieces displayed in chronological order communicates beyond language. You can grasp her changing and evolving emotions and messages, along side her ever-developing technical abilities. Then, in the latest decade, you can perceive the culmination of her entire life’ s work coming together.
Her completed paintings are an end result of her personal studies. There are sketchbooks full of renderings of all that caught her eye. She even had sketchbooks and a set of pencils that resided in the car. I have vivid memories of long-distance drives, my father driving and my mother sketching the mountains we passed in the southwestern United States or limning the ocean as we drove