Lauren Luloff

Working these days has been a flurry of collaging--whenever I can, whenever the baby is asleep, while students are working contentedly.  I supplement the flurry with images that I love--and post them here so as to collect.  Here are some recent Lauren Luloff paintings that fuel the push for me.  Love these--their informality, their delight in the specificity of fragments, their "world dipped in paint" quality.  If the most important, most delightful moments of the world were dipped in paint and gathered together, this is what we would see.

Notes on painting (from a current studio notebook)

I don't really want to discover painting as predictable.  I also don't want painting to reflect some facet of real life or real culture or contemporary reality--suggesting of course that painting is not real in comparison.  Of course painting will grapple with reality but I don't want painting--my paintings--to be a shadow, a facsimile or a tame approximation of lived life.  Instead I want painting to rear up on its hind legs and BE what it is.  My painting is most interesting to me when it stands fully alone and strongly alone.  The paintings are best when, knowing I made them, I am nonetheless still incredulous about how they came to exist in the world.  They are very separate and real and upright and full and I cannot take my eyes off of them--what I just describe is not a common occurrence but an ideal and rare one.  Most often I am faced with the unavoidable evidence that yes, I made this.

So painting is like a river running parallel to my living.  It never stops, is constantly moving along, and I periodically step in and fumble along for awhile until I get a handle--my bearings.  And then when I am upright and full I can move along with the river--and painting tells me how to see the world anew.

Painting, flowers, little hands, big hands, greens, eggs/Images from the weekend

Piecing/Building a painting, on the wall--painted and pressed against

Shapes from a shape (3)

Shapes from a shape (2)

What I love (Four)

I don't think I need to say much of anything about this image.