Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
LandEscape meets
Gail Factor
An interview by Katherine Williams, curator and Josh Ryder, curator landescape @ europe. com
Hello and welcome to LandEscape: we would start this interview with a couple of questions about Ms. Factor ' s multifaceted professional background. She studied Fine Arts at the prestigious Yale University nad she spent one year in Europe to study art and architecture. She also earned her BFA Cum Laude from the University of Southern California, where she also received the Francis de Erdely Award for excellence in life drawing: did this training in any way effect how she approached her fine art painting practice? And in particular, as an American painter with a wide experience in traveling around other countries, how did her cultural substratum inform the way she related herself to the aesthetic problem in general?
My mother’ s early work( all created during the educational period after the c of circa 1950s 1950s- 1960s) was the core foundation of the different techniques she would use throughout her lifespan of work, both in medium and in concepts. You see a range of abstract work in oil, which would be her primary medium, executed on wood board and canvas, as well as pastel on paper. I feel it was the most abstract time of her career, where occasionally there were hints of architecture or landscape, but mainly studies that appear as marks. You can also witness the beginnings of her sense of color and color-combining develop, of which she truly became a master.
Simultaneously, yet almost as a separate endeavor, her life drawing abilities began to develop. She loved live figure drawing and would always joyfully participate in sessions with models. She had countless pages and books of life drawings that close to outnumber her landscapes. These were something she never promoted or presented to the public; they were