Margaret Bedell is best known for her large-scale, mixed-media botanical environments, produced in a type of viscosity printing of her own invention.  She inks actual leaves and flowers with layers of ink, composes them on the bed of an etching press, and then prints them on dampened paper.  The layering of inks is done in such a way that they retain their clarity through each run.  The result is a series of images in which the colors and luminosity change subtly from one to the next, as subsequent layers of ink are absorbed by the paper.  The fundamental connection to the environment that defines this technique as Bedell’s own is also the basis of her work en plein air in watercolor and oil.  Her gestural brushwork, bold, effusive color and broadly painted surfaces evoke her preference for wild coastlines and vibrant, tangled gardens.  Indeed, communicating the feeling of the scene leads her to work expansively, quickly and sometimes with disregard for the sanctity of her materials- she very frequently scratches through her own watercolors to reveal the roughened white of the paper beneath.  For all of this, Bedell is no stranger to figure painting and here we are treated to some recent examples of portrait sketches in oil.  Like her landscape and so-called stillife work (for nothing is truly still in her oeuvre), the sketches themselves are active even where the subject is taciturn.  They are enlivened by the physical energy Bedell imparts through her technique, learned in part from her experience with California painters such as David Park, Paul Wonner, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Brown.