Elaine Bagley Anroux at the Old Mint

One week only-Portraits by Elaine Badgley Arnoux at the Old Mint (4th and Mission)
San Francisco: Faces of the City
Friday April 3 through Tuesday, April 7, 2009, Noon to 5 PM

The show will be open to the public between the hours of 12 noon and 5 PM Friday through Tuesday, April 3 through 7. A $10 donation will be requested at the door.

You can learn more about Elaine from this wonderful video. I've known her since 1985 when she ran an art school (EBA) at SOMA Arts where I (and 40 + other artists) now have studios. She had been involved with so many progressive arts causes, including the Shopping Cart Show which sought to bring public attention to the plight of the homeless in SF. As the creator of the video so accurately says, her life is a love affair with art.



Shadow And Light is about the life and art of Elaine Badgley Arnoux. The film examines seminal moments of her life; from her childhood traumas; two early marriages, moving to France at age 50 with her 27 year old lover and finally meeting the man of her dreams to grow old with.

The enormity and scale of her life and art projects are revealing to the nature of the artist herself. She lives large and paints large with an appetite for life beyond the boundaries of her canvas and the walls of her studio. Making art is elemental to her being, and is a valiant attempt to come to terms with her own personal history and integrate it into her esthetics . "I had a very dark childhood, I was very old when I was young, I wasn't young until I was old".

What drives Elaine Badgley Arnoux, a gifted San Francisco artist, in the twilight of her years, to work relentlessly to convey her vision of the people in her community through portraiture and the creation of paintings documenting the political upheaval of our time?

Through the lens of a camera we come to understand Elaine's story is a love affair with life. Art is the vehicle that has driven her process of self discovery and delivered her lost youth in old age.