Painter Edie Beaucage is all about invention—in her style of abstract portraiture, in her “Californicois” identity as a Quebecoise in sunny SoCal, in her curiosity about the characters she meets and the personalities she imagines, in her intellectual love of art history and her open-hearted embrace of life’s endless possibilities. Her combination of bright, rich hues and muscular layering of brushwork creates flickering surfaces full of texture, light, and shadow; which at the same time are stylized as flattened in a quirky, folkloric way that eschews realism but explores individuality in the subjects.

I am Edie Beaucage; I live in Venice Beach, my art studio is in Inglewood, and I have gallery representation in Downtown LA. I am connected to the Los Angeles art community in many ways, especially to my artist’s studio friends at the Art Complex 1019 West Manchester. I moved here from Quebec because I could see this city as an incredible creative platform. I am a painter and video artist. 

Los Angeles-based painter and video artist, Edie Beaucage, is committed to her direct and subjective imagination. She intends to create images in a vast spectrum of undefined categories, allowing vague ideas, inconclusive views, wobbly constructs, pleasure or sorrows, and fun to be included in the art conversation. This way, she actively opens up the critical discourse in new and different avenues.

I think my work is similar to an enormous open-ended casting session. I create characters that could become actors in a play or a movie but instead, they land in a painting. There is no "theme" per se but rather a suite of relations between pictures.  Wilfried Laforge at SVA recently introduced me to Warburghian Iconology, Jean Michel Durafour, and W.J.T Mitchell's studies of images. It is the closest and most excellent concept I can use to describe my thinking process. I can explain my exhibitions in terms of image juxtaposition and active metonymy.

"My paintings seems spontaneous, but it is not so unexpected, considering the amount of work I do before engaging in a series. I can think about a subject for months before I paint it. I obsessively accumulate many images in my notebooks around a topic. Afterward, in the studio, it is momentarily translated into paint. I know what I want to paint, and then I let the images develop and let them flow. I discover my pictures as I paint them, and I love the surprise of this process. "

My paintings are a celebration of positive contemporary possibilities. In an era of mass-media thought-coercion, my work is committed to the preservation of intellectual and spiritual independence. I invest my seemingly whimsical subjects with genuine purpose, presence, and the intense assuredness of self-realization. My vibrant portraiture of moments and my casual characters alert the viewer to the urgent need to develop, express, and celebrate the saving force of indelible personality. My process involves gathering images and arranging storyboards from a broad array of sources ranging from Venice street life, to a multitude of paintings and photography in art history; to the contemporary art scene.

Downtown Baltimore got a surprise this April, with the reveal of a large format work of art affixed to the side of Harbor Park Garage, a parking garage located at 55 Market Place. The artwork, which is visible from the Jones Falls Expressway, is a custom piece by artist Edie Beaucage.

Lately, I have been thinking of 1 minute short stories when I paint. I want to know who the character is, what is she doing and that she is being herself. I am interested in finding an emotional value to the portrait; then I feel the character has landed. It’s similar to finding the right tone when you play music. My work can range from emotional loss and fragility to bravura and extravagant characters. It is all improvisation and it varies with my mood.

DnA explores moments in the school’s history, which track with LA’s growth as an art and design capital--from its founding on Wilshire Boulevard  through its transition from what artist Billy Al Bengston calls its "constipated" years in the 1950s. Alum Garth Trinidad recalls the struggles in the 1990s and remarks on its blossoming in Westchester today. Edie Beaucage talks about being part of the new generation that has revived painting.

Edith Beaucage’s paintings pulsate with bright acrylic pigments at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City. This fresh and inspiring exhibition, Sequencer – Spectrum – Reverb, features 25 mostly small-to-medium sized paintings that interact with each other playfully. Beaucage’s world is filled with techno music surround sound. Her abstract, gooey, melodious and loosely representational portraits of millennials are aptly titled with Euro pop names, such as Basil and Zeek, Otto in Pottsdam, Producer Bruno B, and DJ Ferdy Scholk.

Edith Beaucage, “Sequencer, Spectrum, Reverb,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. In loose, wild brush strokes, the L.A. artist captures figures in hallucinatory landscapes that evoke a painted rave. Also on view will be an exhibition of photographs and large-scale video by Bryan Zanisnik, a New York-based artist preoccupied by the architecture of monuments and theatrical sets. 

Here’s our Lookbook from Volta NYC the 2016 Edition of the art fair. All photos courtesy of POVarts staff. Edith Beaucage, "Gudbjorn and Petunia" and "Zest" at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

One of the great things about the fairs is the amount of painting on exhibition. For painters it's a slice of heaven. Even if you don't love everything you see, the sheer variety is satisfying. I started with some last-century work and moved into a few installations and individual artworks. 
 

The surprise of the week was Untitled Art Fair located on Miami’s South Beach. I found it risky and full of discoveries. The selection of galleries was diverse and prospective. The booths were spacious and well installed to appreciate large-scale works that also included installation and sculpture. Adriana Minoliti at Diablo Rosso (Panama), Nino Cais at Central (São Paulo), and Edith Beaucage at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (Los Angeles), are some highlights of my selection. The fair therefore affirms itself to be a great spot to glimpse aspects of Latin American art, both in the emerging and very en vogue rediscovery range, but also as a place for different U.S. and Canadian proposals.

Positioned south of the Convention Center at 10th and Ocean Dr., the Untitled Art Fair returns to its prime beach real estate this year, bringing with it another year of tightly-curated booths, installations and special projects. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the bustle of ABMB, complemented by the fair’s signature tent design, which boasts wide aisles and spacious booth for exhibitors that gave the exhibition a distinctly relaxed air, while offering ample light to emphasize the works on view.

This narrative, however, is merely a scaffold for Beaucage’s sun-drenched, acid-hued palette and the assurance with which she renders loose portraits — in broad, fluid strokes as relaxed as her subjects. The lush, Arcadian surroundings get the same treatment. Trees are little more than wavering verticals: a kelp forest in a rainbow of shades. Mountains, lakes and sky are rendered breezily in lemon yellows and cobalt blues, appearing to glow with energy. 

"The viewer will discover the paintings by looking through sculptures and painting installation. Twelve feet tall multicolor trees, an octagon geometric shape and freestanding painted campers are installed on the gallery floor to produce a deep focus space. The inclusion of the three levels of foreground, middle ground and extreme background objects create for the viewer a effect similar to a depth of field composition in cinematography; allowing the viewer to focus on both close and distant planes. In addition to paintings, Beaucage has created enamel on iron pieces that where fired at 1450° F; fusing glass to metal. Influenced by Limoges enamelings from the mid 1600s, her ravers are incapsulated in a deep glossy tranced out spaces."

Bidibidiba is a figure of speech for love, pleasure & sentimentality. Bidibidiba is where characters are build with painting activation in mind. Childlike multicolored brushstrokes are used to build abstractions that are part of the figure. There is a lot of interesting interaction with the background & the figure in the painting.

Bidibidiba is the title song of the 1970 movie “L’homme Orchestre” (“The Orchestra Men”) with French comedian Louis De Funes. Specifically, the Bidibidiba dance within this comedy had the effect of molding a desire in Beaucage for a modern and colorful life. Bidibidiba is light, entertaining, new, and full of sentimentality: idealistically bound portraits of diverse characters including girls and philosophers, art students (both fictional and real), hipsters with mustaches, Egyptian girls, princesses, knights, dragons, musketeers, wigged women, bearded men, and dandies. They are sometimes in conversations or simply doing their jobs of being portraits and holding the paint together.

CB1 Gallery hosts artist Edith Beaucage from February 26 through April 3, 2011. Her exhibition .hurluberlu, explores the relationship between her characters and their abstractions. Beaucage talks about her exhibition.

Edith Beaucage’s “hurluberlu” paintings, which feature idiosyncratic figures and architectural references are about the rich interaction of the imagination and social spaces. Beaucage’s new series has a Rococo energy, and is peopled by an engaging cast of lusciously painted faux-naif characters. The paintings are sweet, challenging, and utterly original. To better understand the artist’s ideas, I sent her a set of questions, and also asked her husband, Glen Irani, if he would add his perspective.

A hurlyburly is a real-world Tumblr of sensory and dimensional elements, but it denotes a vision or experience that's more captivating and even funhouse than actual chaos or anything destructive. The idea that not only modern art but life itself is a bit of a hurlyburly is at the heart of Edith Beaucage: .hurluberlu.

But none of these artists seems to have as much fun as Edith Beaucage, whose confidently spontaneous figures are breezy, casual and exuberantly expressive. Usually isolated on plain white grounds, Beaucage’s characters — and they are characters, not just figures — emerge from strikingly economical means. “Monster With Blue Eyes” is a Muppet-like figure whose “fur” has been quickly delineated in a fan of broad, blue-green brushstrokes. In the diptych “Hexagon” a brushy sketch of a woman on one canvas calmly looks at another, hexagonally shaped canvas painted in thick concentric stripes. It’s a succinct commentary on viewership that makes us aware of our own position in a network of gazes.