Artist Statement
As a self-taught artist, painting was an event that in many ways simply “happened”—an act motivated by an unexpected craving for color in the midst of a New York winter in early 2003. To my surprise, painting was immediately familiar and reminded me of dance. I was trained as a classical ballet dancer and thought I’d left that life behind; painting told me otherwise and was the surprising experience of coming full circle.
All of my work is fundamentally about capturing the movement, color, and gesture of form while approaching my subjects from the inside out. Like dance, my art begins with the interiority and energy of the physical. I paint with the premise that everything (whether person, animal, object, or other being) has its own particular motion. Everything has its own energy and gesture even if it appears to be still. I consider painting as the act of listening and I try to hear what I see.
Though I used acrylic paints in my earliest work, I quickly switched to oils and this is the medium I now prefer. For me oil paint is alive, versatile, and bodily. Its very weight, moistness, viscosity, and even smell, remind me of the hidden intensity of the subjects I am trying to reveal. Oils have a sensuality to them that helps me connect with the act of painting. Applying paint with a brush, which is the way I usually work, gives me uninterrupted ease of gesture and the freedom that comes with that. In 2009, after a health emergency requiring heart surgery that left me unable to work in oils while recovering, I started using watercolor. Now, I continue to work in watercolor as well as oil.
Recently my work has become more and more about the interconnectedness of creatures and things—for example, a woman becoming a bird, a house becoming a tree, a forest of trees as bodies together dancing. I am looking for the in-between place, the moment one border becomes another. Rather than capture, my intent is to conjure. To capture is impossible. As an artist I want to evoke the internal motion and energy of the subjects I paint. I am after the unseen elements of the world that are so often disregarded.
As the child of an Air Force sergeant, my early years consisted of multiple moves and never living in the same place for long. By the time I was twelve I had lived in four states and two countries. Lately I have started to think about the ways my nomadic past has influenced my work. New military bases meant new houses, new friends, and continually putting down roots that never had the chance to grow. Home for me was transition and childhood was never still. This is similar to my work, which, in so many ways, is simply a response to the idea of being in the world as a state of perpetual flux.
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Artist Biography
A self-taught artist, Lori Anne Parker first began painting in 2003 while living in Binghamton, New York, where she had her first solo show in early 2004, which was well received. Later that year, Lori Anne relocated to Nashville, Tennessee. Since then, she has participated in group shows with Plowhaus Artists’ Cooperative, Chromatics Gallery, and other organizations, in addition to launching a line of art cards based on her paintings. In 2005, she was invited to permanently exhibit some of her work at East End Body in Balance, a wellness center located in East Nashville. In 2008, she had a solo show at the Nashville Ballet. In November 2009, she launched The Watersketch Prospectus, a yearlong project and response to a personal health crisis requiring heart surgery, that consists of weekly watercolors, each painted in less than ninety minutes and shared digitally (by email, facebook, twitter, and on her personal website) each Monday.
Lori Anne’s images can be found on the CD covers, Web site, and professional marketing materials of acoustic fingerstyle guitarist John Danley. Lori Anne received her Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in aesthetics and literary theory, from Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, in 2010.
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