“Consumer Taste from Cute to Cool,” a new show featuring the humorous, ironic work of Edmonds artist Rachel Van Citters, is being hosted by Gallery North through Dec. 6 at the gallery’s new downtown Edmonds address: 508 Main St.
The show began as a comment on shopping experiences the artist has known. For example, in the oil painting “Cool Mart,” hipsters sift through kitschy bargains in a flea market environment.
This is a setting the artist knows all too well: “I spend way too much time scrounging bargains from thrift stores and dragging stuff home most people wouldn’t be caught dead with,” Van Citters said.
Another painting, “Quaint Mart” is set in an antique mall. Here the characters are a demented Bo Peep enjoying cocoa and cookies while her fallen flock misbehave. There’s a painting about a famous discount store and also a peek inside a woman’s handbag at her cosmetic purchases. Other comments on consumerism include “The Night Nursery” series where a pair of children accumulate “strange, wonderful objects and ideas.”
Van Citter’s works are a result of a lifetime of drawing and painting. Moving away from realism, she began producing these “fractured fairy tales” when she and her husband both found themselves laid off from their jobs in 2001. “My paintings confront the world as I find it — often with humor in the face of disaster,” she said. “This tragi-comedic format allows me to transcend overwhelming feelings and events.”
Painting with rich blocks of color and texture, she directs the viewer into the intense gaze of her trademark childlike allegorical figures she calls “Woojzees,” a tribute to the colorful, imaginative stories her Dutch grandfather used to tell.
The artist and her husband moved to Edmonds from the Dallas area in 2002. She can be contacted at www.rachelvancitters.com. For more information on Gallery North, call 425-775-0946.
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