Perceived Realities & Pigments of Imagination Statements
Artists from the
Pigments of Imagination and Perceived Realities
exhibits STATEMENT It’s hard for me to describe my work. I think it should be hard. Creating, I splash a moment on canvas. After that moment I'm different. My surroundings are different. I often paint in the still of the night. The next morning might see that I picked apart and reassembled love, hate, want, need, and time. Words and symbols jumble. I believe you shouldn't understand art at first glance but should have to delve into it to truly appreciate the meaning. My paintings are like poetry and robots. I see the mechanical way we go about living, our violent marches, and our blunders. We ignore widespread suffering (i.e. hunger) and obsess on irrational fears (rare disease, for example). My painting reflects this and hopes to awaken us to what’s right there in front of us. Though born in rural West Virginia, I took root in post-industrial Pittsburgh, where I now live. At the age of two, I began drawing. In my teens, early curiosity for crayons morphed into an art obsession. In 2003, after years of pen-and-ink drawing, collage, poetry, graffiti, computer illustration and photography, I focused in on painting. My artwork is featured in one of the finest folk art collections in the city of Pittsburgh. In 2002, I purchased a building that contained thousands of Kitschy plaster slip-cast molds from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Initially, I pour casting slip into a handful of these molds with no real idea of how they will come together. These forms are then cut and re-assembled into various sculptures and functional items while heavily relying on my intuition. Funk and Surrealist artists such as Robert Arneson and Pablo Picasso respectively, used similar methods of working while constructing their forms and paintings. The Kitschy forms represent different time periods in our culture and when they are combined together they form a slice of time even if it is a psychological one. After the forms are constructed, I apply heavy coats of slip and then look into this expressive surface and figures and objects appear, just as people sometimes imagine objects in the clouds. By using this technique, I feel that my true feelings emerge as I carve away the images that I see. The imagery that appears on much of my work represents the psychological struggle, chaos and violence that occur in many of our lives. Some of the animal figures that reveal themselves are metaphors for different players in the circus of life. For example, the moose represents the clumsy, awkward, yet strong individual making his/her way in a beauty conscious society. The chicken and bird figures represent fertility and growth. Much of my work is very busy with a closely packed composition. These chaotic compositions represent the constant bombardment of information from structures such as government, religion and the media. These structures influence and often form perceptions of our-selves and of others. In any given day we are bombarded with an insane amount of information and people seem to be losing the ability to be able to process this information and decipher between what is right and wrong. Many of the images that we see on a day-to-day basis are quite violent and we are becoming more and more desensitized to this violence. The violent images that are portrayed on objects of every day use such as a teapot implies that we are in contact with this violence in a variety of different ways daily. Laura Jean McLaughlin received an MFA in ceramics from West Virginia University. Her work has been exhibited in over one hundred galleries and museums, including the Mobile Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Delf Norona Museum, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, the Baltimore Institute of Art and The State Museum of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Maggie Milono Memorial Award from the Carnegie Museum of Art and three prestigious residencies from Kohler Company in Wisconsin. Laura Jean’s ceramic work has been featured in various periodicals, including: Korean Ceramic Art Monthly, Ceramics Monthly, Clay Times, American Style, American Craft Magazine. Her work is featured in the following books: 500 Figures, 500 Teapots, 500 Bowls, 500 Cups, Poetic Expressions of Mortality and will soon be appearing in Confrontational Ceramics. She received an NEA Grant to conduct a workshop at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center as well as a Mid-Atlantic Fellowship at WVU. Her work is in the collection of Whole Foods Market, the Porter~Price Collection, Kohler Art Center, Kohler Company and HBO in New York. Early in my career I spent a lot of time thinking about the type of art I wanted to create. I was looking for the proper artistic vehicle that would allow me to express myself on any topic in any number of mediums. What I wanted was a working style that was consistent but not limiting. These figures appeared again and again in my notebooks. They turned out to be deeply personal yet universal at the same time. The figures and themes have many antecedents but are also unique to my time and my place. The imagery is collected from dreams, research, current events, art history, religion, mythology and pop culture. I want the work to be thoughtful, tragic, questioning and hopefully sometimes funny. Tension plays an important role in the images. There is a purposeful tension created between these “clownish” figures and the situations they find themselves in. Tension between past and present, between right and wrong and between silly and serious. I believe the work fits comfortably into the Pop-Symbolist category but my great hope is that they are engaging. Brian Fencl earned his MFA in Drawing from the New York Academy of Art in New York City. He received his BFA in Illustration from Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. Brian is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at West Liberty State College in West Virginia. He is responsible for teaching all levels of drawing and art history. He lives in Wheeling, West Virginia with his wife Tracey and their two sons. EDUCATION MFA in Drawing,
2000, New
York Academy of Art Exhibition and Publication Record
“Pigments of the Imagination” Gallerie
Chiz, Pittsburgh, PA, 2007 |
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| For More Information Contact: Ellen Chisdes Neuberg, Owner/Director GalleriE CHIZ 5831 Ellsworth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15232 Tel: 412-441-6005 FAX: 412-661-5662 Internet: galchiz@hotmail.com |
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