Warp and Weft

The Colorful Canvases of Stanley Bermudez and Ana Guzman

originally published April 23, 2008

Op Art Portraits: Stanley Bermudez spent his formative years in Venezuela. The vibrant colors of Maracaibo, Venezuela, and the Guajiro Indians’ tapestries seen there, had a lasting impact on the artist and his work. As a result, his paintings on display at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education, in a joint show with Ana Guzman, are courageously colorful, with a pattern motif dominating all the canvases. Though his primary subject is the figure, or more specifically portraiture, Bermudez adds a twist, an unexpected element that places the emphasis on design rather than realistic rendering. All of his canvases have been divided into vertical stripes of equal width. Adjacent stripes differ in color; alternating similar colors create a pattern in the style of textile art. For example, the background of the portrait “Simon Bolivar” consists of alternating stripes of orange and yellow. When portraying hair, the stripes become blue and light blue (a Fauvist interpretation or a dye-job gone wrong?). On the face, the stripes are varying shades of flesh-tone. The effect of this color usage is somewhat like a woven cloth, with just a warp and no weft.

Eleven portraits, all utilizing this unique striped design, are hung at eye level. In addition to Simon Bolivar, Bermudez has painted Jose de San Martin, Rafael Urdaneta, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez (titled “Hugo Chavez No!”), using these political icons as fertile grounds for design-oriented explorations. He has also painted his wife, his parents and children. Displayed above these family members and cultural icons is a large painting (46” x 90”) that fuses the U.S. flag with that of Mexico. “Mexican American United States” is part of a new series the artist is undertaking, in which he combines world flags to create new ones, illustrating the mobile nature of contemporary society. Bermudez, who writes that his “process is very similar to the process that Roy Lichtenstein used,” combines his obvious Pop Art influences with Op Art effects. In “Mexican American United States” the juxtaposition of the red of the U.S. flag with the green of the Mexican flag creates a vibrantly undulating shimmer. Stanley Bermudez received a BFA from Sam Houston State University in 1990, and a MFA from Radford University in 2000. In addition to running a home studio, he currently teaches at Gainesville State College.

Pure Bliss: Ana Guzman’s strongest work on view at the Georgia Center is the relatively large (40” x 30”) “Red Scarf,” in which a female nude, with her dark hair pulled tightly into a bun at the top of her head, has her back to the viewer. Guzman creates a strong triangular composition with the bottom edge of the canvas, the figure’s long legs at an elegant diagonal, and the vertical of an intensely red scarf draped over the figure’s shoulder. Guzman combines free brushwork with washes of color over a white ground, left bare in various areas. She uses a similar approach to brushwork, and a nearly duplicated palette in “Seated Female,” which is also the same size, and was completed the same year. Unlike her two similar nudes, Guzman’s small street scenes “Chinatown” and “San Francisco Streets” have been created with thick impasto paint on small canvases (5” x 7” each), rich with a contradicting blurred detail. Tiny dots of color emphasize the expanse of the scene Guzman has captured on such a small canvas, a tiny space for a big view. Though her works lack the congruency of Bermudez’s formulaic approach to image making, they do stand as testimony to a love of painting. The artist describes painting as “pure bliss where time does not exist.” Guzman was born in Havana, Cuba and moved to Pennsylvania as a young girl. She has studied at Moravian College and the Philadelphia College of Art.

The paintings by Stanley Bermudez and Ana Guzman on display at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education are part of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s (NALAC) Latino Art in Action workshop that was held Apr. 4-5. “Creative Responses: The Colorful World of Stanley Bermudez and Ana Guzman” will remain on display through April 30.

Beth Sale