Philadelphia Inquirer
“For pure star quality, Bowar is hard to top, especially when she paraphrases one of history’s greatest painters, Diego Velazquez. Bowar’s version of the iconic painting Las Meninas is a tour de force – an homage and masterly transcription of a 17th century subject into contemporary language.
Two groups of small landscapes demonstrate that Bowar can work sensitively in intimate scale as well as in the more demonstrative and high-style Renaissance mode. Two artists in one is more than viewers expect to find in a hot weather interval.”
- Edward J. Sozanski
Then As Now, Exhibition Catalogue, Sordoni Art Gallery
“Sharon Bowar makes reference to the religious-allegorical painting of Italian Renaissance, and to the archaeologically-detailed mis-en-scenes of nineteenth-century academic painter Alma-Tadema, in her Santa Lucia (2003). Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind, typically shown holding a platter that supports and presents a pair of eyes gouged out in martyrdom (witness to her faith), stands here on a loggia overlooking a composite view of Todi, a medieval town in Umbria, featuring architectural sites of the Temple of Santa Maria della Consolazione (attributed to Bramante) and, at the highest point on the horizon, the Gothic church of Santa Fortunato, combined here into one single imagined view. The saint holds at the center of the painting, not a platter but a vase of grape leaves in which we can just make out the artist’s own eyes gazing out of the painting, the only site / sight of color detail in the otherwise monochromatic (colorblind) painting.”
- Ronald R. Bernier, Ph.D.
|
