New Gallery Representation: The Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery in Los Alamos, New Mexico

Karen Wray and Gallery Curator, Gabrielle

 

In February of 2024 I dropped in on the Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery in Los Alamos, New Mexico while we were picking up favorite bagels at the local bakery shop. The gallery is across Central Avenue from the Bradbury Science Museum, another favorite local establishment. The museum is home to exhibits of the history of the atom bomb, developed by the Oppenheimer group to "prevent all future wars" (and to end the Second World War). Other exhibits demonstrate research in Fusion as a means to harness electricity in the future. 

The owner, Karen, and I enjoyed discussions of composition and color for a few hours. She teaches classes at the gallery and has a deep background in art.  She started her gallery decades ago in a side street mall and a few years back, expanded to this new location and now represents over a dozen excellent artists. I was tempted to sign up to teach classes beginning with my 1-dayArmature/Composition class (see: the appendix in Composition Armature Class Notes). But I needed to get myself organized again. What are my next steps?  Do I continue explorations of Watercolor? Do I investigate how Artificial Intelligence will affect lives of artists -or how best to show teachers how AI could be taught effectively to students.  One more recent project has been to expand on my 1-day class: do paintings with radical proportions: 1 to square root of 3 or near 10x17 or even better a square root of 5 proportion: 10x23.  The latter is of great interest since in fact one can define the golden mean in terms of square roots of 5 by construction, as shown in the appendix of my Class Notes. The golden Mean = (1+square root of 5)/2 as shown on pages 46-47 in the appendix of my class notes. (Try it on a calculator: find the square root of 3 and the square root of 5: 1.732... and 2.236... since 1.732x1.732 = 2.9999824 is approximately 3 while 2.236x2.236 =4.999696 is close to 5. )

Of course, I left a copy of the class notes with Karen and I showed her my website and blog.

This meeting proved fortuitous: about a month later, Karen Wray invited me to join her gallery:https://karenwrayfineart.com/ or https://www.facebook.com/TheKarenWrayGallery.   

I delivered 7 paintings to the gallery a few days later: they can be seen on these gallery links or at the "Karen Wray Gallery Exhibit" I constructed on my website: https://www.karenhalbert.com/myexhibits.cfm?exhibit_id=122. My "exhibit" includes the armatures used during the design phase of the paintings - or if not used, during the review stage - after the fact.

The exhibit contains for example the following painting with its armature:



A few weeks later I added 3 more paintings to the collection at her gallery as seen in the "exhibit" on my website.

The gallery will have a group show with opening reception on May 29. I intend to be sitting in that elegant chair.





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