Categories: Visual Arts
The fantastical profusion and power of the wild world, the exuberant weed cracking the sidewalk, landscapes that might be primordial, post-apocalyptic, or leaked from some parallel dimension have long been at the heart of my work. We are both estranged from and connected to these worlds—unions and collisions are explosive, fracturing. I work with collaged images as grounds: laser prints, photos, magazine and book pages. I might bury them, but I feel their call-and-response with the paint. The picture plane is often in flux, the images may be a slow burn, but they are always the provocation for the brushstrokes around and over them. Working in the studio in tandem with pre-existing images transforms the world into material. Always in view—no matter the media—is that click of significance, when some thing becomes something entirely else: Richard Dreyfuss shaping mashed potatoes in Close Encounters, insisting, “This means something.”
At Douglass College, Rutgers University, I studied with Fluxus artist Robert Watts, who gave me a deep appreciation for the spontaneous and serendipitous. My paintings and mixed-media works have been shown in New York, Provincetown, New Haven, Chicago, Philadelphia, Berlin, and elsewhere, and I have participated in the Aqua Art Miami and Governors Island art fairs. In 2020, I received a Bronx Council for the Arts BRIO grant in painting.
Services Offered
Visual artist - painting, mixed mediaContact Information
Phone: 3476248878
Website: lauraelizbell.net