Bickel's Naked Truths

by Eva Tihanyi

 

Nude. The word itself ellicits a visceral response. Naked, bare. Unclothed, unmasked. Essentially vulnerable. Barbara Bickel is a figurative artist, to be sure, but her nudes do far more than reveal the human body. They are interviews with the body as a way to connect with the soul.

 

The 42-year-old artist’s latest exhibit, Fire at the Edge of Water, which opens at the School of Ideas Gallery in Welland on June 6, comprises 36 of her smaller pieces (all mixed media on wood) from six different series: The Spirituality of Eroticism, Battle Cries, Illuminatus, Bodies Menagerie, She Knows, and Fear and Desire: A Dialogue. The show continues Bickel’s exploration of the body as manifestation of spirit. “An art piece doesn’t feel complete if I do not have some reference to or element of the body in it,” she says. The exhibit also documents her work with the images of fire and water. Balancing these seemingly opposing elements is a central concern for her and reflects her strong belief in art as a transformational process: “The water element feels always present in my art as the wood grain visually echoes the surface of water. Water centers me. Fire decenters me and pushes me to create, stretching me into new places within myself and in my art that I would not necessarily go if I was to stay in the comfort of water.”

 

Bickel has certainly avoided settling for the comfortable. She left a career in social work twelve years ago to become a professional artist and just last year moved into further new territory: a Masters in Education program at UBC focusing on arts-based research. Born in Regina, she grew up in London, Ontario, and  Victoria, BC, but spent most of her adult life in Alberta where, as she puts it, “my art career was born.” She moved to Vancouver in 1998. “Returning to the ocean after all these years gave me a sense of space in a way the prairies did not. You look out over the prairies, but you dive into the ocean. It involves depth.”

 

 Bickel’s creative journey has been, in her own words, about “uncovering the knowledge of the body” and drawing it “into full visibility.”  This engagement involves both an erotic and a spiritual element, and the combination provides much of the force at the centre of many of her paintings and collages. Her art honours and celebrates the human form and its inherent perceptiveness: “What links all of my art is the desire to open to the body and through that to spirit. As the late poet Audre Lorde has said, eroticism is a life force. For me, eroticism is also about experiencing fearless desire. It’s about being able to experience being in your body without all the usual blocks, all the cultural restrictions. We shouldn’t have to be afraid of desire, but unfortunately that’s what is often taught to us.”

 

Because so much of her work depicts women rather than men, Bickel is often asked about her feminism, whether feminist issues can be avoided if you are an artist who also happens to be a woman. “Yes and no,” she says. “I think that as a woman you can’t avoid the oppression that feminism addresses and challenges because it is so prevalent and part of our world, but I don’t think that all women choose or have the support to be awake to these issues. Our Western society makes it very easy to stay in denial and avoidance of what feels too overwhelming.” Her primary reason for painting women more frequently than men is a simple one: she herself is female. “My desire to understand myself as a human in this world has kept my work focused on women. This focus is also about inviting other women to reclaim their own image which is generally imposed upon them by society.”

 

Bickel’s work is, for the most part, undeniably sensuous, not just because of its figurative aspect but also because of its masterful use of colour.  There is drama and subtlety in the compositions as well as in the colours—fire and water fused into an intriguing blend of motion and stillness.

 

Bickel’s work has changed since her homecoming to the West Coast. She has shifted from always putting the body forefront and centre to placing the body in action in an environment. “There is more of a narrative to my work now,” she says. “For me, narrative entails creating multiple images. Each piece is part of a larger story, so I’ve been working on triptychs and sequences.”

 

The one thing that remains constant in Bickel’s art throughout the past decade is her belief that various truths can be accessed through the body: “The body remembers experience differently from the way the mind does, and if we choose to spend time with it, we can tap into that memory and that wisdom.”