Laura C. Thorne - metaphysical painter

STATEMENT

My images are inspired by a metaphysical exchange that occurs between the seer and the seen, which then transforms the seer. As a young child, I climbed up into the canopies of birches, pines, and cedar trees, so that I could watch the sky through flickering leaves and feel the crooked support of the bark beneath my body. The sensations of the physical, intertwined with the intangible, felt transfixing and risky as I balanced within the branches, alternately drawing me up towards the clouds, so expansive and ephemeral, and down towards the earth, so hard and permanent. I was captivated by a shifting energy that flowed between concrete things and changed my perception of them. The sense that ordinary perception could, at any moment, be a vehicle for extraordinary recognition and endless wonder, would become the subject of my art.

Drawing, painting and printmaking is a way to swim around in a soup that is both earthly and mysterious. Michael Dailey’s color fields, and Joan Miró’s early work have provided traction for my own. I, too, have struggled to personalize an abstract vocabulary with color, in order to ask rather than answer questions that float, wordlessly and endlessly, in the back of my mind.

When I begin to work, I don’t know how many incarnations the forms will take or if the experience will lead to a satisfying resolution. A finished piece is the result of many decisions and yet, a conclusion, when it comes, is surprising and poetic. Translucent shapes energize the visual field with disquieting contradictions of displacement and belonging. My materials create an environment, not unlike nature, where form pauses, arrestingly, before changing in the pulse of a moment.