You might say that this current subject matter grew out of her erstwhile career. “I was thinking about the world of pop, because pop has been my entire life,’ she says. She’s referring to the numerous catchy tunes she’s written since her first hit, “A Groovy Kind of Love,” at age 19, as well as the art of the fifties and sixties (like that of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol) that has inspired her visual work. In her mind, she then made an associative leap: “Pop!, I thought, Bubbles are pop. Maybe I’ll paint bubbles…they pop!” She began blowing bubbles “like a 4-year-old,” photographing them, and painting them against a bright-blue background. And then, suddenly, inexplicably, she felt the composition lacked the buttery brown of Cracker Jack. “I loved the color combination. But I no longer knew what I was doing, or why; I just needed to do it that way.” Eventually, the painting evolved into the semiabstracted snack-food-centric series of the upcoming show.
It’s Bayer Sager’s willingness to follow her creative intuition that truly links her first and second acts: “I’ve always said that the best songs don’t come from us; they come through us,” she says. She’s currently awaiting her next inspiration. “I don’t know what I’ll paint. I just think, as long as I have this passion, I need to continue following it…I always believe that if you empty the rice bowl, something comes along to fill it.”
