Maiden Rock, Wisconsin – Swan Song Contemporary Arts presents its sixth special exhibition of the 2009 season in, Fugitives in the Field, featuring new work by painter, Julie Baugnet, including collaborative work by Baugnet and poet, Felip Costaglioli. Fugitives in the Field opens Sunday, November 8 with a reception for the artists from 1:00-3:00; with a reading, by Costaglioli, at 2:00P.M. The exhibition will be on view during regular gallery hours - Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 5:00 – and by appointment.
Fugitives in the Field features small and large scale oil paintings by Julie Baugnet, whose richly layered, figurative abstraction yields luminous fields of color, punctuated with discrete forms and fragments from nature. Birds and insects and plants occupy her compositions; collectively they testify to the beauty and fragility of the natural world.
Baugnet is aligned with the teaching of the great Hans Hoffman, who declared that nature is the source of all inspiration. In a very lush large-scale painting of a giant Hosta, entitled Francis Williams, Baugnet acknowledges the ever present inspiration of her husband, gifted garden designer, Carter Clapsadle. His gardens surround their home, providing Baugnet with a continual source pleasure and subject matter for her work.
Moved by many painters who came before her, Baugnet has been influenced, especially, by Paul Klee, with his floating cosmology of organic forms and Richard Diebenkorn, who fractured the logic of the picture plane; and by her travel to Italy, where she has studied and been inspired by the palette of many Sienese painters.
Often beginning with an underlying grid to map out the composition of her works, Baugnet builds color and imagery by glazing many layers of paint. Her process yields a palpable sense of depth. She locates her subjects across dimensional levels - some float on the surface; others are embedded in a glaze of earthy pigment. Through her unique approach to the picture place, Baugnet creates a poetic sense of space and time; conscious of life and death and the fleeting aspect of the material world.
Three works featured in Fugitives in the Field depict endangered species. In Loggerhead Shrike, Threatened in Minnesota Baugnet paints a magical glow around her lone subject and his perch. He reigns like an emblematic apparition who exists outside of time. The Shrike’s iconic power makes a challenge to our forgetting of species, and holds space for his place, in the future.
In a recent collaboration with poet, Felip Costaglioli, Baugnet presents Herculean Labors: An Aviary (Twelve Snapshots and a Diary) featuring series of twelve small-scale portraits of birds. In each, Baugnet personifies her avian subject, whose portrait is accompanied with poetic text about relationships, by Costaglioli. Aligning each subject with human position or concern, Baugnet and Costaglioli place dramatically different species on an equal par. In this, they assume a holistic understanding of the world where, indeed, all sentient beings are part of one web of consciousness.
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Julie Baugnet received her Master of Fine Arts Degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She has exhibited widely, both regionally and nationally, and is represented in numerous private and public collections, including Walker Art Center’s artist book collection, the Minneapolis college of Art and Design artist book collection, The Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and the University of Minnesota Children’s Hospital. The excellence of Baugnet’s work has been acknowledged through a variety of grants and awards, including a fellowship from the Atlanta Center for the Arts and a Jerome /MCBA Book Arts Fellowship. Baugnet serves as a Full Professor for the Art Department at St. Cloud State University. She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota
