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OVAC Award Recipients:
A Brief Update by Christine Faris Gloria Abella De Duncan
Gloria Abella De Duncan won the OVAC Award of Excellence in 1995. As a native of South America with an international art career, she welcomed OVAC’s recognition as it introduced her work to Oklahoma. Gloria served on the OVAC board in the late 1990s, taught at Oklahoma Baptist University and Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but concentrates on her own work now. She describes her winning entry to OVAC: “The works that I presented were large format paintings dealing with the ambiguities of life and the natural power of women to balance perceived realities and transformation.” Concepts of ambiguity, transformation, and mystic subject matter have been central to her work. She gives form to these thoughts in dream-like quality in paintings and drawings, and more recently in digital media. Gloria exhibited in London at Christie’s (XX Century Colombian Art), Israel and Los Angeles. One of her paintings was added to the Oklahoma State Art Collection in 2007. A recent stay in Portugal, Spain, and Morocco provided much fuel for her creative imagination as she observed the daily life there. More recently, Gloria has been a successful illustrator for award wining books, including Mystic Siren: Woman’s Voice in the Balance of Creation by Vanessa Paloma, and Praxis and Ambiguity of the Enemy by Fernando Garavito. She is currently working on a book of Hebrew art and a series of prints for an exhibit in August in New Mexico.
Gloria Abella De Duncan, The Wedding Ring, Acrylic on Canvas, 60”x48”
Rebecca Friedman Wheeler Rebecca Friedman Wheeler received OVAC’s Award of Excellence in 1998. On the way to her studio in the garage apartment behind her house, I negotiate my way around mud puddles in Oklahoma’s spring rain. Her oneeyed, most friendly three-legged dog follows me. We look at the colorful flower pots and found objects as sculptures and I am taken in by the warm and cheerful atmosphere of one of Oklahoma’s consistently productive artists. The garage holds a good number of large canvases. Her OVAC entry Promise is among them. She describes herself as a color field painter. She loves the joys of color, the layering, the “inside” effects she can create. Rebecca is very comfortable with her work; it is non-judgmental, childlike, and never aims at political statements. The upstairs studio space is furnished with well-worn work tables, chairs, wooden storage drawers, and antique quilts. Small pastel drawings of summer beach scenes are ready for framing. Rebecca pulls a few prints out of storage – figurative work commissioned as a religious series by the Santa Fe Arts Council. She goes to New Mexico several times a year to do monotypes and lithographs. In addition, Rebecca cherishes work with textiles in collages. They are magical. Her artist’s statement for her exhibit at Untitled [ArtSpace] in 2007, reads: “Old tattered-torn cloth of our past, Belgian linen, hooked rugs, half-made, old lace, chiffon, dresses, curtains and women’s handmade works, sent to market and found again. Textiles, always collected and loved, have become the medium for my canvas….”
Rebecca Friedman Wheeler, Garden, Antique Fabric on European Linen, 12”x12”, from her exhibition at Untitled [ArtSpace] in 2007.
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