ARTIST STATEMENT
I am here to engage a conversation in image. Access to the unobstructed landscape readily welcomes the created image into the conversation for me- vast and awake as a listener, and never a critic. For many artists, other subjects radically beacon in welcome, too. Whatever allows for further creation as expansion, without predefined restriction, truly aligns with building value.
The exchange for me begins creatively between the everyday seen/touched, and the non-everyday or unseen - as materials, connecting: HERE, to synthesize into something together, newly found or arrived. For me, these two components of continuous experience are never so much at home in their essence as when they connect somehow into a conversation that reaches beyond before, and expresses a brilliance anew byway of it. I use my palette of oil paints to host this journey, like an ironic homecoming of sorts, and the work hopefully serves in opening up the uniquely found beauty generated by it.
Revealing the alignment of the image’s fresh presence, as beauty, as an integrated and complete conversation- a home-coming - becomes the work and the task. Accordingly, the finished perspective, once located as the art, doesn’t ever stay in the same place from piece to piece; instead, it returns to its aligned “home ground” of radical perception only by its creative arrival in connection, anew. Another way to explain this: the more paintings surface to look like gripped/static perspective repeats of themselves, the more it is transparent that the conversation in the value that I hold for my work alone, is dwindling in my focus and needs opening back up. The aperture of sight grows with perspective, not the hardening of one view.
If the stimulating experience of this exposure to a radical irony of perspective as flux/change- is unfolding and happening in my work through the painting, or shared somehow within the image, it is what I hope to reveal and offer refreshingly, as a painter. This is why it can be really challenging for artists to have others read/view their work before it has contacted this point or level of honed discovery as a language. It takes work to untie things from their hardened boxes (“clouds are white”, or “grass is green”), and release them to other incarnations of possibility. What are words or colors, without deepening a context in relationship, ultimately? What are their intrinsic meaning but the language they explore by being drawn out within relationship itself? To believe in this discovery of something new through building in-relationship is the commitment that the artist has to make in order for the work to become itself, and for an artist to know they are making art. No one would demand that a juggler pause their ball mid-air to prove how well they are juggling it, without it falling down, and thus the juggling cannot BE. A painting, metaphorically, needs to become defined as the juggling movement it is - not stripped short (in its possibility of expression) by way of forcing an examination of an inert, isolated ball. It cannot be the same thing at all unless we want to make a joke of our potential. The better the art, the more this divergence to the opening of creation, or the closing to it, becomes deeply evident. We must remember the limits to our perceiving are unconsciously self-imposed and conditioned, as a starting ground. That the limits are not really real. For me, this is why landscape is such a source of departure, artistically. It has no requirement to be conditioned in order for it to be acknowledged as complete. Thus, the less the restriction, the better.
In this respect and way, may the conversation we truly share for the creative impulse, endlessly anew, as the opening-of-ground we create, begin.
Joyfully together, in color’s real and unfurling gifts ; )
-Laurel
ABOUT THE PRINTS
All prints are an archival quality giclée (a French word for '“spray ink”) and they are made-to-order from a small business in Vermont. The paper print on archival enhanced matte brighter white paper, or on a thicker Hannamuhle white paper (depending on your print size), comes with an additional 2” white border around the image with the title of the work and the artist’s signature hand written in graphite. The canvas prints, always finished on site with a fine UV protectant, forgo any white border and instead mirror-wrap around a 1.5” deep stretcher frame (lightweight pine) with the signature in permanent marker on the back. My feeling is that the more refined capture of the matte paper prints relate better in formal or quieter spaces, containing a spacious quality enhanced by the additional border and the array of framing possibilities. I offer additional professional framing if you reach out when ordering a paper print. Alternatively, the stretched canvas prints are considerably bolder in both shape and color (via the nature of the canvas printing and coating), and thus ideal for spaces in need of infusing energy and some dynamic physicality even. The mirror-wrapped edges also allows for the image to feel like it’s “jumping off the wall” in one flowing unified statement. They are also significantly lighter in weight than the large framed paper prints due to no heavy glass component. You are welcome to reach out if you need some help in deciding which style to hang in your space, or would be assisted by a custom framing consult to go along with it. Cheers!!