Louise Bourgeois
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San Miguel artists Karen Wight and Kathleen Cammarata create work that explores the beauty and complexity of the human form. This kind of art, the depiction of the body, can never be neutral like the drawing of a chair.

The practice of drawing from a nude model did not develop until the fifteenth century in Renaissance Florence. It coincided with the availability of cheap paper manufactured for the newly invented printing press. This paper allowed artists to make exploratory drawings. The sketchbook was a byproduct of this period.

Marlene Dumas
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What ensued was a routine exploitation of the female body as a signifier of erotic desire. In the art form of the European nude, the painters, spectators and collectors were men. The "Venus of Urbino" by Titian and "Olympia" by Manet are two examples of a large number of works.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries artists emerged, many of whom were women, who depicted all aspects of the body. Their drawings and paintings acknowledge the body's physicality. Contemporary works express feelings, pain, and disease. Two known artists in this category are Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas. And an extraordinary example of this genre is Frida Kahlo. Karen Wight and Kathleen Cammarata create work in this category.

Karen Wight
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Wight explores the movement and structure of the human form in contemporary bronze and resin sculptures and silver jewelry. Her sculptures strike poses that are active, even hanging in space, like acrobats. Her jewelry has miniature bodies and hands that move when touched.

Kathleen Cammarata
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In Cammarata's drawings, the body reveals interior thoughts and experiences. Figures have an attitude. Hands gesture with feeling. Faces are in shadow, rather than having a flirtatious look in the eyes or on the lips.The figure is never laying down on the couch. The drawings are a testimony to the human condition.

Karen Wight
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Wight's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Monaco, Denmark, Germany and Italy. Wight graduated from Chouinard Art School and received her MA from UCLA. She was a designer with Walt Disney Productions and was an instructor and consultant in Art and Movement at UCLA. She directed her own gallery in Santa Fe and had a studio in Provence, France.

Kathleen Cammarata
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Cammarata has been drawing and painting for 38 years. She taught drawing, painting and printmaking in two museums. She was the Printmaking Professor at UMass Lowell. She has won over two dozen awards and grants. She has had 24 solo shows including at Belles Artes. She is in collections in the USA, Canada, and Mexico.

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        Karen Wight                                                               Kathleen Cammarata

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