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Laura Von Rosk

I have been painting landscapes for a decade. I used to think these paintings were about specific places, or a certain experience of a place.  In many ways this is true.  But I notice now there are forms repeating - certain shapes, or a certain kind of space: an enclosure or a fold or a dip (all those ditches), and much of this is emphasized, manipulated, or just plain made up.  Now when I see places like this, say - a sand ditch along the NY Northway, a gravel pit, a cultivated field, or just a peculiar bend in the road - I'm attracted to it, and I make a mental note.  It seems now I look for the places that are already in my head.  If I can't find it out there, I'll attempt to create it.  Holes? - I like looking at them, I like creating them.  Roads? - I am always driving.  It seems the beginning is usually that simple.  There is a tension between form and what's going on in the real world.  And the form (dips, ditches, open fields, etc.) isn't just a product of what I see, but combines what I know about constructing paintings with some deep and as yet unconscious memory system with what I see in the landscape. There may be a story hidden in the painting, which I myself am still only vaguely aware of.  Small, intimate, sometimes intricate, full of illusion, or twisted space - the drama of  broken ground: pages in a story.  They feel like safe places; then, other times, like dangerous places: but necessary places - something has happened, or will happen, and everything has, or will react to it.  Often there are only signs of absent people: who made the tracks, cut the stumps, lit the smoldering fires?  I still can say I work from memory, but at times not sure where the original memory comes from.

Near Hoffman, 12 x 12 inches, 2007 Lake Ontario, 12 x 12 inches, 2006. Grassy Lake, 14 x 14 inches, 2004.

 

   
Black Trees 12 x 12 inches, 2004. Untitled (blue water, 14 x 14 inches, 2007 Winter woods, 12 x 12 inches, 2006.