We recently connected with Edie Beaucage and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Edie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
I took a high risk for my last solo paintings exhibition, “All Over The Time,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles last April. I filled a vast art gallery with nine oversized (nine-foot tall) shoulder portraits of invented characters and five large abstract floor sculptures. Interwoven in the exhibition was a personal story set to correct a long-standing painful memory into a reinvented positive one. Therefore it was a very personal story shared with extreme boldness. In the arts, risk-taking is the best and most rewarded action artists can do. The art world delights in spirited and resounding artwork. A show must balance the depth of the exhibition’s purpose and how it is presented. I had done a model of the display, and I knew it was going to work. I could imagine how the pieces would play off each other and how the sculptural works would move as a person walked around the show. I also felt each painting’s strength on its own, with the different brush strokes, watercolor details, and the character’s kindness and iconic stature. So my show, which, in fact, is a statement or a proposal to the public, was set positively in my mind with spirit and depth of meaning. They won’t tell you this in art school, but the test in the art market is getting great press and sales; it is a must if you wish to have an ongoing career. The stress test I do to know if I am doing the right thing is: I ask myself this question: if I saw this show, would I think it is incredible and the best show I have ever seen? Yes! My exhibition worked out remarkably well: ArtForum Must See, Artillery Publisher’s Eye, LA Weekly Artist Monday, Gallery Now International Banner and Must See, London Art Cube’s top 10 emerging artists April 2023, and Carla’s Instagram pick plus sales and a brilliant cameo of the whole exhibition in the television series “Good Trouble” (Freeform), where my paintings are sparkling off the walls of the scene where the main protagonist, who is trying to become an artist, meets a gallerist in a downtown LA art gallery.
It is a science in itself to do a successful art exhibition, and the truth is that artists are trained to question and look at anything from a different unique perspective. It is all about risk, or maybe a better word is audacity with bravura and determination. In French, we have a saying, “La chance sourit aux audacieux” Chance smiles at the audacious and the braves. In the arts, this holds truth. Audacity, for me, is having the guts to do something unusual and unexpected, entirely in line with my own point of view on the world. I aim to be relevant and engage others in my perspective.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am Edie Beaucage, a painter and video artist living in Venice Beach. I left Montreal, where I was born, in the mid-’90s, to live a creative life in California. I studied gestural painting as a young teenager and classical drawing in Italy in my 30s, then I received an MFA from Otis in 2010. I have had gallery representation at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles since 2015, and now, I am flirting with New York galleries. I value creativity and imagination beyond everything. Art is made to be felt and understood; it is a package deal of emotion and intellect; loving and liking art is ok in my book. I create paintings that reflect feelings, represent people, and wish to be inviting and entertaining. For me, an exhibition space is a place to take the viewer into a new environment where one is offered brighter and deeper colors, funkier people to look at, and a slowly unraveling augmented reality by Edie.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Having Grit is a must in the arts. I had to be patient and have deep confidence to keep going for many years. After moving to Los Angeles, I was uninformed and had not received any guidance on how the American system works in this field. At the time, I rented a studio and started looking for gallery representation. I was painting all the time and going to see shows at cool galleries like Acme right by my studio in Santa Monica, but all the dealers were nonresponsive and quite avoidant. It took me a long time, years, before finally, one of them told me:” You know you need an MFA in the first place?” Here is the lesson I can share with people in this position. The art galleries can pick every year just in Los Angeles from about one hundred fresh, strong, and highly well-formed MFA graduates to try in a summer show and see whose work gets the best response, so if you are outside the system completely, you have fewer chances to be selected. In fact, the gallerists have no motivation to pick a person without an MFA unless exceptional factors come into play. I did my program while my son was in kindergarten, and it took three years to complete. A gallery gave me representation immediately after graduation. So that was my first resilience test. You see, being an artist is not a path where you do this and that happens automatically; it is all very unpredictable, and it requires an excellent sense of believing you are strong regardless of what happens as time passes, regardless of what people say or if you are exhibited or not. It takes courage and toughness of character. There is definitely some strategy involved every step of the way. I often had to think about what was best in the long run.
I tell anyone who asks me what it takes to become an artist, and I think it is like this. Suppose you wish to be an artist in the contemporary art market. In that case, you are somehow entering an “Olympics level” of competition, which is very surprising. You will need to work and get educated, but it is not “work-work”; it is fun thinking work. Still, it is the “Olympics” non less, whatever way you cut it: having a fantastic talent, or brilliant intellect, or cleverness beyond the norm, you will find yourself with another one hundred artists in an international art fair, and then your work has to do its own type of performance with success. You will need tenacity and perseverance. That is why I choose to create work that is true to me. It became my protection: authenticity and frankness worked for me and gave me balance and fantastic feedback! That is not luck. It is resilience in action.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I would rephrase this with: How do you keep growing your exposure and your notoriety as an artist?
Make the best work you can do, be active on Instagram, participate in art residencies, apply for art prizes, and get your boots on the ground.
Instagram is super efficient at connecting artists, curators, galleries, and collectors. With Instagram, I now have direct contact with many artists. It is exciting to exchange with them while they are in New York, London, or Berlin. I was also messaged by a great New York gallery on Instagram to talk about and share my LA exhibition. And that is a simple way to let a gallery look for artists and see if there is potential for cooperative projects and future shows.
I spend much time working with a collective of international artists I co-founded in 2020. I FoundU Collective; we put exhibitions together in various unusual spaces on different continents. I do artist residencies for months at a time, and I also apply for art prizes.
“Booths on the ground,” I just spent weeks in NY seeing fairs and galleries and learned so much about the art market there. It is incredibly different than Los Angeles and hyperactive in comparison. LA is a hub for laid-back creativity, a perfect place to think, enjoy the weather, and go to my studio and work. Suppose LA is a plump fresh heirloom tomato. In that case, New York is tomato paste concentrate, and the business part takes precedence over the carefree way of creating I have developed over time in Los Angeles. While I was in New York, I had to adjust and drop my carefree “surf” talking very fast after I realized it is all business in New York all the time. There is a lot at stake there, indeed. I saw sold-out shows left and right! New Yorkers, the best and most educated viewers, have been exposed to so much art since they were young. It is a pleasure to talk with art critics and galleries there. I love the level of high-minded professionalism. Not that Los Angeles is not like this; on the contrary, New York galleries are opening here now. It is simply very different from the perspective of being an active artist in the Big Apple. Yet there is something about New York that is awe-inspiring. Just the same as the song goes: I love LA!
The most essential factor to increase your exposure is to do great, informed work; everything is based on that. If your paintings are really great and innovative, they will be noticed. Therefore doing a solid exhibition and repeating this over time does get you into the spotlight. The press plays a huge role in growing exposure and is also now highly active on Instagram; since everything is turning to digital, it has become a platform for diffusing information about the exhibitions, and there is now a new type of posting about shows that, for example, turned my solo exhibition into picks for different magazines, that was extremely rewarding to get these accolades.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ediebeaucage.com
- Instagram: @ediebeaucage
- Other: www.luisdejesus.com
Image Credits
Installation pictures by Sevlas Photography