GALLERY SHOW HIGHTLIGHTS SARGENT’S WORK
From landscapes to portraits, Be Sargent has experimented with a variety of formats throughout her decades-long career as an artist, but for her upcoming show at the ART123 Gallery, which is located at 123 W. Coal Ave., she is focusing on the abstract.
Sargent grew up drawing horses in her Albuquerque home. She studied at the Boston Museum School and graduated with a bachelor’s in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.
After graduation, she became a graphic designer and installer of corporate art.
She started her art career painting landscapes, but she’s also found herself focusing on portraits and even doing some murals. She’s done a couple murals in Somerville, Massachusetts, and she did a mural honoring the Navajo Code Talkers.
She came home to New Mexico in 1993, and split her time between summers in Massachusetts and winters here. Nowadays, she resides in Pine Hill.
The City of Gallup has also commissioned her for a mural project.
But these days she has found herself gravitating more toward abstract paintings and the color within them. For her ART123 show, she picked out certain colors and then forces herself to do more than one painting featuring that color. She said she enjoys “making colors do things differently.”
Most of the show’s pieces are on the larger size and won’t fit in the average person’s home. The biggest paintings on display are four feet tall and five feet wide.
“What I’m hoping is that some businesses would see they’d be great in commercial spaces,” Sargent explained.
She said she couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else besides art.
“It’s just my life. It’s what I do. I’ve always felt I would be an ‘artist’ from when I was 8,” she said.
As for her future, Sargent said she isn’t sure what’s next exactly, although she doesn’t see herself straying far from abstract work.
Sargent mentioned that a lot of artists tend to turn to sculptures in their later years, although she doesn’t really see herself doing that. Georgia O’Keefe, who died in 1986 in Santa Fe, began her sculpture work after losing much of her eyesight due to macular degeneration.
When asked about the hardest part of being an artist, Sargant said it was her habit of trying to be perfect.
“You’re always looking at something to see if you like it, and if you don’t like it, it drives you nuts until you fix it,” she said.
Sargent’s work will be featured at ART123 Gallery from April 13 until May 4.
By Molly Ann Howell
Managing Editor