Kate Barrengos: Architectural Play

Meet Marin County artist Kate Barrengos.

This photo is from Kate's website, which gives you all the deets on her background, including the galleries and shows she's been in around the San Francisco Bay Area for the past couple of years. We here at Beans have admired her work as a fellow member of the Marin Arts Council, and sincerely feel like if we could paint, we wish it would be like Kate paints. Check out pieces in earlier MAC show here.

Kate's newest show is "Architectural Play." Fifteen acrylic-on-linen paintings of childhood block interpretations of architectural icons . . . like here, Stonehenge.

Quite fittingly, the show is in the Mill Valley building that houses Thompson/Dorfman Urban Residential Development.

Kate's paintings, and the curation of them here, are stunning. The dust-to-umber-to-sienna color palette, the clean rectangles of the pieces, the geometry of the blocks within them all look just right in the building's foyer . . . .

. . . and up the stair well

. . . and into the offices themselves.

Kate's written statement about her art includes a sentence we love particularly: "I paint in order to understand." Which reminds us a lot of Flannery O'Connor's explanation of why she wrote: "I write to discover what I know."

We love Kate's work. We love the precision, creativity, architecture, vision and exploration in it. We love how she paints in order to understand, and that she engages in that process, and brings forth these images into the world.

We hope you'll check them out yourself through October at this show, and visit her website to see more: http://www.katebarrengos.com/

Thanks for your artistic self, Kate! YOU ROCK!!!!