The artist’s new exhibit at Tim Bessell’s gallery, on view through July 1, features 35 of her works created exclusively in digital media.
Highlighting a different sort of toolbox as her palette, Anne Varick will open the exhibit “Synthesizing Form and Color: New Work by Anne Varick” at renowned surfboard shaper Tim Bessell’s Westbourne Street gallery Monday, May 26.
The exhibition is co-curated by Bessell and Varick’s daughter, art historian Anne V Lauder and will run through Tuesday, July 1.
The 35 works included were created by Varick, 84, in the last several years following her honing her largely self-taught skills over the pandemic.
Varick, originally a sculptor, painter and draughtsman, trained with Renata Spiazzi in La Jolla from 1985 through 2020. Varick works exclusively in digital now, utilizing programs including Photoshop, Procreate and Topaz Labs.
In recent years, she’s become “an autodidact,” Lauder said, “taking it all on herself.”
“Synthesizing Form and Color” is “a culmination of her mastery of digital media,” Lauder said.
The show is by no means exhaustive, Lauder added, as Varick “produces every day. She’s incredibly disciplined.”
Varick’s work is evocative of her background in sculpting and painting, as she will take one of her existing sketches – created from the 1970s through the current year – and scan it into the computer to then recontextualize it with her digital toolbox, Lauder said.
Varick then leans on her sculpting terms, digitally carving (taking away) and modeling (adding to) with Photoshop.
“Photoshop gives me such wonderful tools that do not exist in the traditional artist’s palette,” Varick said, adding her favorite functions are “pinch,” “twist” and “ripple.”
The subsequent pieces highlight both the representational and abstract, with geometric forms and discernible shapes from nature throughout.
The resulting archival pigment prints are face-mounted to acrylic.
One work featured in the show, “Chirping into the Light” (2023), is one of Varick’s favorites, she said, and began with a photograph of flowers that she then layered with digital tools.
“Using the mind’s eye, other images – branches, leaves and birds – appeared through ‘pareidolia,’” Varick said, referencing a term that means to see the unseen.
“I hope the viewer will experience the same lightness and sense of play that I have when I create,” she said.
“Synthesizing Form and Color” marks Varick’s first solo exhibition in La Jolla since 1977 and her first-ever collaboration with Bessell.
“I have a real affinity for her work,” Bessell said, “because she’s primarily a sculptor, and I really appreciate her magnificent sculptures.”
Varick’s move into digital media is “really impressive,” he said.
Bessell, whose parents were artists, grew up in La Jolla and began surfing in 1966 at age nine, also always wanting to be an artist, he said.
“Surfing became my way of life,” Bessell said. “I started making surfboards when I was 13 … and then I went to school at San Diego State [University] to study art.”
Bessell integrated both passions seamlessly for decades and is now among the premier surfboard manufacturers in Southern California. His boards have featured in solo exhibitions at the StolenSpace Gallery in London and at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla. Bessell’s Andy Warhol-inspired boards are among his most recognizable.
Years ago, Bessell made the first board for Varick’s then-10-year-old son, Jon Roseman, now a celebrated surfer who keeps returning to Bessell for board shaping.
Bessell is inspired by Varick’s commitment to creation and functionality. He is producing a limited-edition surfboard based on Varick’s “Hangs in the Balance,” Bessell’s favorite exhibition piece showing a sculpture suspended over the ocean.
“Functional art is way more important than fine art,” Bessell said. “It enhances people’s lives physically on a day-to-day basis.”
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