Artist's Statement
Artist: Laura Thorne
Email: diego8@earthlink.net
Website:
http://www.sevshoon.com/laura.html
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I spent parts of my early childhood
in canopies of trees, where I watched the sky through flickering leaves and
felt the crooked support of the bark beneath my body. The sensations of the
physical intertwining with the intangible were transfixing and risky, alternately
drawing me towards the sky and the earth as I balanced within the branches.
I was entranced and, over time, grew increasingly fascinated by the concrete
yet shifting energy that is created when one perceives the external world.
My awareness of a poetic exchange between the seer and the seen took root,
and would become the subject of drawings, paintings and prints.
In the Fields and Planes series of paintings,
I use juxtapositions of calligraphic marks and translucent
planes of color to explore the complexities inherent in assembling a fundamental
visual vocabulary. The proximity of spontaneously drawn lines, mingling with
flat, transparent color planes, heightens the charge and ambiguity of the space.
Tensions between concealing and revealing, between layered depths and surface
activity, hint at shifting viewpoints. The images operate on a primal or low
brain level to evoke inexorable, hidden and generative forces at work.
In addition to my extraordinary teachers at the University of Washington,
the roots of my work found traction through two artists that I would never
meet: Lee Krasner and Joan Miró. When I saw an exhibition of Lee Krasner’s
work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2000, I was struck by the sheer exuberance
and range of her expressionist mark-making, which she sustained until the end
of her life. Joan Miró, whose early paintings I discovered at an exhibition
at Centre Pompidou four years later, personalized abstraction by often using
the thinnest of lines and washes to paint large-scale, enigmatic scenes that
were intensely evocative of temporal states and physical and emotional vulnerability.
I concentrate on the feel and play of visual dynamics in order to
unearth the impulses in which they originate.
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