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A BEARY NICE ERA, INDEED
Sunday Star , StarMag, July 17, 2005
While researching retro interior design, BRIGITTE ROZARIO came across an artist in the United States whose work is the epitome of retro
SHE prefers to call it vintage. But a rose by any other name ? the style of her art fairly screams retro. The colours are the vibrant and bold ones normally associated with the 1950s and 1960s – red with orange, blue with apple green. The women in her works are all dressed in the fashion of that era, and the furniture and furnishings are all from then.
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Kerry Beary with one of her vintage paintings which depict scenes, fashion and furniture from the past. |
Meet Kerry Beary, 33, of Louisiana, the United States.
Calling her work “ultra modern pop,” Beary says it is an exploration and passion for the mid-century way of life: The fashion, the furnishings, advertising design, etc.
In an e-mail interview, Beary said she believes that if she can bring a viewer to this place, with colour or the way a certain line is drawn, then they will instantly relax and become more in tune with their senses. She wants her audience to slow down, savour time as an element, become more focused and think and do more.
“Think about it, people used to relax more in the 1950s and 1960s and a major influence of recreation was fuelled by the technology of that time. There were many new, exciting, fun things going on during that time, be it art, fashion, media, exploration. There was action as opposed to reaction. In a word, which isn’t really a word, this was a time of ‘dynamica’.”
Beary explains that through her art she hopes to heighten her audience’s appreciation and understanding of things from the past. “You can look at something or hear something and be in a different place. Retro is a word or culture, but I’m trying to elicit an emotional response. There’s a level of durability an object has when it can do something like that,” explains Beary.
In most of her paintings, there are at least one or two women. Beary explains that she is trying to highlight the classy women of the 1950s and 1960s.
”The message that I’m trying to get across is that women still have the ability to be graceful. Femininity began to change in 1964 and the portrayal of women in images made after this time became more sexually overt, but at the same time these same women were emotionally introverted. The changes have been gradual over the course of time and this all happened over the course of decades.”
With Bachelors and Masters degrees in painting, Beary taught fine arts to high school students initially. Upon realising that teaching was taking up most of her time and energy with little left over to paint, Beary decided to give up teaching.
“As a teacher, I placed a lot of emotional involvement into my students and I found myself going months without painting.
“I discovered that the more time went by, the more I got away from what I really wanted to do with my talents. I was working with high school kids who only took the class because they had to, not because they wanted to. The job was causing me to focus on disciplining the children rather than disciplining myself. Self discipline is only one road to creativity, but this is what works for me,” says Beary.
Another change that Beary and her husband made a few years ago was to move out of New York City.
“The move was a hard decision to make, but we needed to relocate after 9/11. We wanted to go somewhere warm and a place that we had family and friends, so Louisiana was ideal. I lived in New York all of my life, and felt the need for a drastic change. We wound up in my husband’s home town of Baton Rouge (in Louisiana),” she says.
Leaving the big city also means that the artist has more time to spend with her computer programmer husband and their two mini dachshunds and a Cardigan Welsh corgi. Incidentally, it’s her husband who gave her the cute name: “When I met my husband, Jeffrey Beary, we always joked that if we got hitched, I would be Kerry Beary (I was actually nicknamed Kerry berry as a kid but I didn’t let him know this).
“So when we did get married, it was just natural. Everyone remembers Kerry Beary anyway!”
• Kerry Beary’s art can be viewed and ordered at www.kerrybeary.com
Copyright Star Publications (M) Bhd
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