If you’ve been to Beyond the Bridge on 6th recently, you’ve most likely seen some interesting art featured above the couch inside. It is the work of The Trail’s own Hallie Bateman, who will have nine pieces featured there throughout the month of February.
These works are mostly in ink and watercolor, but Bateman said she loves most mediums, having worked with everything from a video camera to clay. Pieces, she says, take her anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours depending on the detail.
When asked what she wanted viewers to get out of her work Bateman said, “I want to make people laugh, that and maybe…sometimes I like to creep people out.”
The work at Beyond the Bridge is definitely playful art that is humour out of odd pairings. Her largest piece features an old man with a pigeon on his head, while other work includes a crocodile in a wedding veil and a hunchbacked woman riding a camel on an oriental carpet inside of a house.
Bateman describes her work as “lots of animals doing people things and people doing weird things.” Some of the artists whose work inspires her include Edward Gorey, Graham Roumieau and Matthew Grey Gubler; both of the latter are also multi-media artists.
While Bateman’s work displays a professional level of quality, she is a very humble artist. “I’ve always been a huge doodler, in grade school my desk was crammed with doodles…then [I] started taking doodle more seriously when I came to UPS,” she said.
Bateman says that since coming to Puget Sound, she has gotten lots of help from the professors; most notably Ellen Hoobler, who helped her price out her work since she had never sold her art before.
In addition to the pieces at Beyond the Bridge, Bateman does a lot of artwork for different school groups, including KUPS and comics for The Trail. In addition, Bateman is the art director for the weblog Bygone Bureau and illustrates for the online magazine as well. Former Puget Sound graduates started Bygone Bureau, which received the Web Award in the blog category at South by Southwest Interactive in 2009.
Bateman explained that her goal with this set of work currently on display was to create little scenes “to make you curious and make you wonder what is going on.”
Besides the animal and people pieces, Bateman has done many potato portraits for commission at events like the Alder Art Walk.
In Bateman’s own opinion, her work is “not necessarily contained or explained …just makes you think and want to know the whole story and in that fill in the story.”