Kathryn Bagwell Makes a Game Out of Painting Human Figures

Some artists are born and some artists are made. Some artists, though, become newly made by traveling multiple artistic avenues. Dallas artist Kathryn Bagwell grew up a trained musician and began drawing to cope with loss. Ten years later, she has become a successful fine artist, selling out her art collections and appearing in pop-ups and Arts District galleries.

“All my education and training is in music, and I still play music all the time. In my church in Dallas, I’m a pianist,” Bagwell says. “I took one drawing class at the Creative Arts Center in Dallas, then after that I really developed kind of on my own, to kind of come up with my own language, which takes a while. But I really had the luxury and time to develop my style. I’ve been really fortunate in that regard.”

Drawing came easy to Bagwell, who took her first class in 2010 following the death of her sister.

“After her death I really wanted to do something different, so I started drawing,” she says. “I’ve always been able to draw; it runs in my family. My sister, she was a talented artist as well as our grandmother.”

With many artists and musicians in her family including her two daughters, one of whom sings opera in New York, the artist gene is in Bagwell’s blood. She unintentionally began a career as a painter when she was creating art initially to cope with loss and, ultimately, to have fun.

“Some of my works like the Refractive Woman series, I use all straight edges and circle and triangle and oval templates,” Bagwell says. “So I draw with graphite directly onto the canvas. It’s kind of a game I play; I don’t use any hand-drawn lines on those works. And the ‘Nefertiti’ piece is an example of that, all templates. It’s kind of like a riddle; you can’t do any hand-drawn lines, it’s not that easy. Those are actually a lot of fun.”

Reenacting the process with her hands, she explains how she uses her tools, saying, “I’d have a template one way and swing them around, turn them over, back and forth. And then some of the other works I draw directly onto the canvas usually with pencil or charcoal depending on what I’m doing.”

The Refractive Woman series has become a favorite of Bagwell’s work and has sold out at her previous pop-ups. The portraits feature shapes constructed into female bodies and, as the artist says, are “all about the complexity of the lives of women in contemporary society.”

The two newest pieces in the current seven-part series were first exhibited along with 18 others in the Atelier Building’s revolving gallery in the Arts District.

“Then, there’s some of my pieces that are collage works,” she says. “There’s a large piece when you first come in made of handmade paper, newspaper, vintage music. There’s two or three pieces that mix oil paint with the paper.”

The exhibition highlights one of her large, new works, “Liar, Cheat, and the Thief,” depicting three men made from shapes and patterns playing dice at a table. Unlike her other portraits, which she typically names after seeing the final product, this topic was inspired by her husband and represents an intentional scene.

“That piece is a little bit of a departure for me because my husband suggested I do something on that topic,” says Bagwell. “Usually I name the works after I do them, but this is the one I kind of pieced it together, I had in my mind a concept.

“So much of my work is about the irony of human beings – I mean the fact that human beings are so capable of being so good and so benevolent, and then on the other hand they can be really just the opposite. That’s a lot of what my work deals with is the dualities of people. That’s the reality of people. Boy, it’s a big topic actually. ‘Cause people are crazy!”

The artist laughs as she considers the central theme that interests her in her own work.

“A lot of my work deals with self-introspection and psychological quandaries within ourselves,” she says. “It’s the juxtaposition of negative and positive traits in people that interests me. Probably all of us have a little of one of those qualities – liar, cheat and the thief – within our psyches. Or at least the potential, right?”

This can be seen in the contrasting shapes and patterns in most of Bagwell’s output. Her works, which appear as cubist in design, connect different shapes to one another in geometrical networks to create human faces and bodies.

“My work is all of people,” she says. “Some of it is more abstractive, some’s more realistic, a pretty broad scope of more figurative work.”

Her next big project will retain her figurative style, but venture off the canvas. The upcoming series, which will be represented in December at Jordan Roth’s RO2 gallery in the Tin District, will present several carved totems. These 6-foot-tall mahogany totems will elevate, quite literally, her works into new territories.

“The totems are a continuation of that figurative style,” she says. “The forms themselves, I’d call them anthropomorphic. Some suggest a body but none are really meant to be a body. There’s not a lot of figurative work being done in Dallas. Not to generalize, but it’s really a breath of fresh air for the arts scene in Dallas.”