Artist's Statement, Lori Lorion
Tender and Fierce is Truth and a Good Painting is a Noble Little Truth.
The Silent Room Where Paintings Hang…
I am most at home when I’m sitting in a gallery, alone, surrounded by paintings. I love to be lost within the viewing experience. Paintings reveal themselves all-at-once and through a sort of zigzagging the bounds of linear time. Creating a painting is similar to the experience of viewing one: The loss of oneself in the act.
Human figures are often the subject of my work. I am interested in expressing ideas about language, relationships and psychological states. Surface texture intrigues me. Direction of strokes, color relationships and thickness of paint contribute to the rhythm, and rhythm is essential. My work constantly changes while I work, sometimes uncomfortably so. There are moments during the creation when I must let go of my intentions and allow the process to carry my vision to a surprising place. This loss of control is unsettling; a dance between crafting and letting the muse work through me. I explore daily rhythms of light and dark, seasons, civilizations lost and born anew, poets' words falling and rising, time passing, time birthing, cycles of emotional states, bodies fleshing and wilting. Most essentially though, in the stilled movement of form, I love to express the beat of silence.
When I am in the presence of paintings, good ones, something essential is embedded in my heart, as if I am encountering first-language; a living entity. It takes some sort of wicked grit to make art from a place of humility and stick with the thing year after year, day after day. The making forms the life. Tender and fierce is truth and a good painting is a noble little truth.