Bedford Gallery
Lesher Center for the Arts
1601 Civic Drive
Walnut Creek, CA 94596

HoursWednesday – Sunday
12 – 5 p.m.

About Face, a juried and invitational exhibition, continues the fascinating tradition of creating portraits, using a contemporary lens to speculate how future generations might perceive the way we value beauty, power, and ultimately what we hold culturally significant.

Opening Reception, Saturday, April 15, 2023
12 - 2 pm TICKETS Bedford Gallery presents About Face, an exhibition that explores the tradition of portraiture through a contemporary lens. The show features nearly 100 local, national and international artists and examines how current societal values such as beauty, power, and cultural significance may be perceived by future generations. The exhibition runs from April 15 through June 25, 2023.The artists in About Face challenge traditional portraiture with current concepts, perspectives and media that reflect the individual. Some, like Dennis Brown, focus on underrepresented BIPOC bodies, while others, like Andy Warhol, use unconventional media, such as 4-minute film portraits called Screen Tests. The artists also break compositional norms, as seen in Marbie's painting Every Time, which depicts the full human form using brightly colored shapes. Despite their different intentions, the artists in About Face share a common goal of reexamining the age-old tradition of portraiture in present-day contexts

Marrow Gallery presents Tondo, a group exhibition featuring the work of Shawn Powell, Kristin Farr and Travis Collinson. A tongue-in-cheek take on the round canvas, the three artists use the circle as a beach ball, a patterned hex sign and a shooting star racing through the galaxy. The stiffness and seriousness of a traditional tondo subject, historically featuring renaissance portraiture, is traded for the literal and representational. The exhibition runs March 12 - April 16th.

I have on a number of occasions used imagery of stars in my work. Usually as a means of illustrating the concept of night. This group of paintings is composed of heavenly events. They are illustrative and draw heavily from graphic representations of the sun and stars used on tee shirts in the 70's and 80's, the works also combine the elements of facial features, this personifies the heavenly event and offers a somewhat whimsical representation of the cosmos.

Lora Schlesinger Gallery is proud to present Love All, Travis Collinson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery featuring new paintings and drawings. The exhibition opens with an artist’s reception, Saturday June 8th from 4-6pm, and is on view through July 20th, 2019.Travis Collinson’s work is comprised of idiosyncratic interpretations of people, objects and personal memories. The highly detailed renderings are composed of simple objects of personal importance, but also contain a common generational resonance. Certain themes often recur, including images of family members, religious icons, artistic predecessors, pop cultural inspirations, cartoons, and mementos of recent histories. For the artist, examining and re-interpreting the recent past is a way to learn and pay homage to the influences that form and guide his ever-evolving practice.
 Collinson’s recent series explores the American tradition of advertising and the “pin-up.” The paintings build on the visual vocabulary of print advertising while exploring the relationships the medium has to 18th and 19th century romantic artists, such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Taking David Hockney’s painting Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky (1974) as its point of departure, this exhibition focuses on portraits of artist pairs. The presentation considers not only how each painting conveys aspects of the subjects’ identities as individuals and artists, but also how the selection and placement of sitters draws attention to the relationships and psychological connections between them. Side by Side is the first exhibition to demonstrate how artworks from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection will be remixed with those from the museum’s collection and elsewhere to introduce fresh perspectives and ideas. The show includes paintings as varied as Frida Kahlo’s Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Wedding Portrait (2012), as well as a new work by Bay Area artist Travis Collinson created for Side by Side. The museum interviewed Travis about commissioning a portrait for the show.  Link to read the interview here.

Knobby Knees, Travis Collinson’s second solo exhibition of paintings and drawings at Maloney Fine Art, is a new body of work; a series of portraits using family, friends and colleagues painted with a signature style of simplified form and pure color, providing insight into the intimacy shared between the artist and his subject. Collinson started as an illustrator/cartoonist, creating comic book narratives within the frame. An emphasis on drawing is underscored in his work. Each of his subjects, seemingly devoid of expression and in a state of anomie, are depicted with large heads attached to bodies cut off at the knees—distortions of form and space, compressed as if swaddled within the frame. Through this compression, they become highly expressive, gesticulative figures of personal emotions and spiritual truths.  Conceived as a series, these artworks are a continuation of Collinson's investigation of the work of other artists, primarily those whose portraits are recognized as their legacy, like Jean Auguste DominIque Ingres, Édouard Vuillard, and contemporary artists such as Alice Neel, Alex Katz and Marlene Dumas. His interest also lies in the personas that an artist takes on; in this series he focused primarily on the persona of Andy Warhol, known for his opaque, non-persona often likened to that of a zombie. The title of the series, Knobby Knees points not only to where his depictions of people end within the frame, but also draws reference to the Nabis group of artists: Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, Paul Sérusier. Pronounced nah-BEE and derived from a Hebrew word meaning prophet, the Nabis artists each took on a different persona within the group. Collinson imagines himself as the Nabi of the Empathetic Portrait, looking to interior spaces and to artists' internal thoughts and experiences as refuges from the modern world.  Link to Maloney Fine Art Blog

Maloney Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Travis Collinson, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
 Drawing from the influences of both classical painting and minimal abstraction, Travis Collinson’s work creates a framework for people, nature and space to exist in an anxious state of entropy.  With a skewed perspective and distortion of unassuming subjects, objects and environments, the artist’s compositions are at once familiar and enigmatic.  Collinson’s painting and drawing style, influence by the early work of Lucien Freud, juxtaposes near-photographic rendering, subtle exaggeration and a pallet of muted tones to create remarkably quiet scenes inhabited by sublime, psychological subjects.
 Collinson has shown throughout California, most recently at the Berkeley Art Museum exhibition ‘Hauntology’ and Eli Ridgeway Gallery in San Francisco.  His work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum as well as numerous private collections.  Collinson holds a BFA in painting from California State University at Fullerton.
 Maloney Fine Art is pleased to present the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Link to review by art critic, Kenneth Baker, in SFChronicle