| Artist | Pausha Foley | Resides | United States |
| Website | pausha.com | Mediums | Pen Ink Pencil |
| Print Shop | prints.mindlessstudios.com/pausha | me@pausha.com | |
| Representing Gallery | Silio 118 Online Gallery | Themes | Figurative Human Form Animals Surrealism Symbolism Mythology Metaphorical Narrative Fantasy |
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About the artist
Pausha Foley is a painter and a multi-media artist based in Santa Barbara, CA, where she uses pencils, brushes and photo cameras to express her unique perspective on the reality surrounding her, and writes a monthly newsletter [https://pausha.com/newsletter/] where she dives intimately into the mechanics and undercurrents of her various artistic adventures.
Pausha has had no formal art training to speak of. She has developed her style in the course of a process of exploration of life, and various forms of it’s visual expression. The depth of experience and intensity of focus is reflected in forms and faces of her subjects.
Artwork Themes & Subject Matter
Pausha Foley aspires to create images that are like ogres and onions: full of layers. No image should have one meaning if it can have two, or four, or twenty. The more meanings on can glean, the deeper one can dive, the further one can reach, going farther, beyond the surface appearances of things reaching deeper, below the momentary, temporary faces life wears, the more one can capture and express reality down to its bones. The fundamental, unchanging bones of humanity.
Pausha aspires to draw myths.
Instead of drawing an image of a woman, Pausha Foley wishes to draw an image of womanhood. Instead of drawing an image of a human, she wishes to capture and express the essence of humanity, and that can be best done with symbols. Hence the rabbit.
When one draws a woman, even a yellow woman, it will be a drawing of a yellow woman. If one removes all aspects of the model that are personal, that are specific characteristics of this one person, like her face, her hair, the woman becomes anonymous. No longer an individual human but a representative of a group of humans.
If one further removes the sexual characteristics: genitalia, nipples, even a belly button, the anonymous woman loses another layer of specificity and gains another level of anonymity. It ceases to be a person and it becomes a symbol.
Having lost layers of personal characteristics the character becomes a symbol imbued with layers upon layers of meaning aligned to humanity at large. Layers and layers just like in ogres. And onions.
CV
Selected Group Exhibitions
2023
Surreal Women, Surrealist Art by American Women, Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, CA. United States.
Small Images, Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA. United States
2022
Uncanny, Westmont Museum, Santa Barbara, CA. United States
Art about Agriculture, Santa Paula Art Museum, Santa Paula, CA. United States
2021
100 GRAND, Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, CA. United States.
2019
The Next Big Thing, Studio Channel Island, Camarillo, CA. United States
A Bird in the Head, Gallery 113, Santa Barbara, CA. United States
Many Faces, Gallery 113, Santa Barbara, CA. United States
