Bedonna Wakeman's Gallery

Bedonna has been involved in the arts her entire life. After attending Eastern Michigan University and Western Washington State University, she moved to the Bay Area where she worked in experimental theatre and conceptual art with the Odyssey Company and Francisco Museum of Art. In 1979, she moved to Europe and continued work in Spain, Germany, France and England. She returned to the U.S.A. in September 2001 and now lives in New Orleans where she ‘keeps her fingers to the pulse of city’ while she shows and sells her work on Royal Street/Orleans Street (behind St. Louis Cathedral) as one of the famous Pirate Alley Artists. Since arriving in New Orleans she has shown her paintings nationally and internationally at restaurants, galleries and private parties. Her highlights have been her showings at African Museum of Art in New Orleans, New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival , house artist and art coordinator for Ray’s ‘Boom Boom Room’ & Art Lounge in New Orleans, speaking at the Pickford Theatre at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. as a representative for all New Orleans Artist and most recently being the House Artist for the Spotted Cat Music Club on Frenchmen Street. Bedonna received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation which she used to travel to Senegal and do a comparative study of the spiritual Muslim Bay Fall of N'dem and the people of New Orleans who were part of the first drum circle in Congo Square. Two of these paintings are on display at Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans. Bedonna has captured on canvas a feeling of musicians like no one else!?There are no tricks in her paintings… she is a fine art painter using the Pop-Art style. She hand sketches each motif, mixes her colors to fit her mood and the emotions of her subjects and using detailed and creative brush strokes along with composition of light, she has been able to create a unique effect. While her subjects choices may seem straightforward, her minimalist and abstract approach moves beyond portraiture and delves into the interplay of detail and space, of flow and pattern. Examined up close, her colors appear unlikely selections, but from a light remove, the resolve themselves as whole and vibrant representations. Like the performers they depict, these paintings can seem at their most animated in the dim light of clubs and night scenes, bold yet open to individual interpretations.