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 in the mystery of the viewing experience with hope that some sort of revelation will occur. I spend time with paintings; allowing color, texture, and form to wash over me and deepen my awareness. Paintings reveal themselves all-at-once and not-all-at-once, 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. I explore external contemporary realities by penetrating inner worlds of the psyche and reflecting upon how these states translate through language. How do we live in the 21st century? Who are we? What moves us? What haunts us? What challenges us? What will become of us? How does life feel? How does language both hide and reveal truth?
Surface texture intrigues me. Direction of strokes, color relationships and thickness of paint contribute to rhythm, notes and chords capturing an eternal now, while simultaneously exposing a reality existent within a span of linear time. My work constantly changes, sometimes uncomfortably so. There are moments during the creation of each painting when I must let go of my intentions and let the process carry my vision to an often surprising place. This loss of control is unsettling, a dance between crafting and letting the muse work through me.
My exhibition, The Dream Awake, February 2014, includes 20 paintings that quietly ponder the most basic of human experiences: that of cycles. 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, bodies wilting, are all concepts considered. Most essentially though, in the stilled movement of form, is the beat of silence. One series in this exhibition is called Messages. These large-scale paintings address the four cardinal directions: North, East, South and West, as well as dream states associated with night and awakening. Large, playful figures are tuned with the cardinal directions. Figurative essences give presence in unsuspecting forms from said directional forces. And what of such directions? Considering the cyclic nature of human existence, these directional forces, and the powers of day and night, exist only from the human perspective. Humans, planted on the earth for a short time with feet grounded, bodies weighted, are in reality on a whirling ball that exists in silent dark space.
When I am in the presence of paintings, good ones, something essential is embedded, 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.
Home
|
Next
|
