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Maria Entis, Special One (2010), acrylic on canvas [Ian Tan Gallery, Vancouver BC, Apr 10-29]
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Maria Entis, Silent Nest (2010), acrylic on canvas [Ian Tan Gallery, Vancouver BC, Apr 10-29]
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Vancouver-based artist Maria Entis has gradually shifted her artistic style from hyper-coloured abstractions and mixed media pastiches of paint, patterned papers and foil to more recognizable organic imagery.
The images in this exhibit are also single compositions rather than experimentations with divided canvasses. There is no sign of the Japanese script that characterized earlier artworks. Nests, Eggs and the Empty Nest is more derivative of paintings by Stefany Hemming (with the addition of eggs, and without the same conceptual rigour).
Painted “from her heart and life,” the images of nests and eggs in this exhibit express her feelings of becoming an “empty nester” with her children grown and leaving home. The works are meant as personal expressions of her thoughts about life and death, birth and departure, with nests filled then abandoned: the “primal stable circle,” as she describes it. She writes that the eggs signify fertility, birth and growth, as well as a lifetime of possibility and adventure.
Maria Entis was born in Yokohama, Japan and moved to San Francisco at the age of ten. She attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and earned a BFA at San Francisco State University, then worked as a designer in various traditional and electronic media for such clients as Pacific Data Images (now DreamWorks Animation), Sanrio and KRON-TV. She won an Emmy for outstanding achievement in graphic design in 1987. In 1993, she began working full-time as an artist and painter. This is her third solo show at Ian Tan Gallery.
