Featured Artist Laura Malone

Artist Laura Malone creates dreamlike figurative paintings, inspired by choreography and connection. Visit her website to see more.

 

 

In one way or another my work is always about embodiment— of mood, of connection to others, of the gestures of body language, as well as my own gestures as I move paint across a surface. I want the viewer to resonate with the sensations of flow and expansion that the brushstrokes convey, to participate in my pleasure in the act of making. I’m interested in what it feels like to be a human in a body, the joy of its pleasures and the sorrow of its many losses.

 

 

I grew up in Tucson Arizona, raised by academics. The atmosphere was reserved emotionally and I longed for a life that was juicy and full. My grandmother was a painter. Summers, we would visit her in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I slept on a cot in her studio between canvases and flat files and grew to love the piney scent of turpentine.

 

 

It was an antidote to the desert dryness and my family atmosphere. My grandmother set up a still life, handed me a brush and a tiny canvas, and I found emotional freedom in making art.

 

 

I’ve always loved to dance, and I see my paintings as a choreography of color and shape. When figures tangle with each other or their surroundings, the boundaries of my subjects come into question.

 

 

Inner life radiates outward into the environment, while the figures are simultaneously penetrated by their surroundings. An interplay between foreground and background reflects how what we call self  is always shifting. This push and pull creates a rhythmic journey of brush and body that invites viewers into a dynamic dance of identity and experience.

 

 

As a woman—or a person, for that matter—I sense myself as both subject and object. I don’t mean this in the negative sense of being objectified. Rather, as an awareness that we are seen from the outside as someone separate while simultaneously feeling our own interiority. This is reflected in the way my work dances between representation and abstraction often within the same piece.

 

 

For years I thought I had to choose between realism and abstraction. I couldn’t do it. Maybe because I cherish two things: the simple beauty of how things are, on the one hand, and the exhilaration of sweeping brushstroke on the other. I made it my quest to integrate them, to have my cake and eat it too, if you will.

 

 

Some moments are carefully observed; others cut loose with ferocious energy. Sometimes we are still, sometimes moving. We focus on certain things and sweep over others. I’m conveying the constant flux that expresses flowing states of consciousness.

 

 

For the past decade or so the work has been about what it feels like to be a woman—our interiority as well as our experience of connection. As I probe the psychological themes of female friendship, self-relationship, and the body as a wellspring of joy and depth I feel a deeper appreciation of my own femininity.

 

Laura Malone invites you to follow on Instagram and Facebook.

 

 

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