STATEMENT OF WORK

   My painting is an act of faith. When I make a painting breakthrough, I am exhilarated and accomplished, which gives my life meaning. How ideas connect to the whole of the painting is what makes the painting. I have an incessant curiosity to stay present in the moment of seeing. I feel the right decisions rise up from my feet through my body to my hands placing paint. Bruce Chatwin's "Song Lines" describes aboriginal people communicating at geographical distances through the earth. I get my messages from the earth. I was a dancer for decades and now a yogi, relying on my body to guide me. My arms reach out to the canvas up from my feet rooted down. My paintings are informed by Impressionists and the Abstract expressionists. Compositional concepts absorbed decades ago are continually evolving within me to this day. I best express my most passionate realities, (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious. I look for spatial relationships : the picture plane changes constantly through the volume that color creates, (in a constant state of relational movement). What one thinks is coming forward then shoots back when in relationship to something else coming forward. When oil paint gets scraped, the mud color is warmed up or cooled down with another color to obtain the exact temperature range.The Anita Shapolsky Gallery had shows of my undergraduate painting professors when I was in my 20’s. I attended their openings. Now she shows my paintings. Three years ago she did not recognize me at the fancy opening, asking, ‘who are you?’ I said, “Anita, you have my paintings on your walls!’ Then she told me, “Lorna, you got wild!” It must be how my paintings have formed me over decades.