Laurie McGugan
Artist Statements
February 28, 2022
Since my Path Exhibition shown here, I have completed more paintings, expanding on these ideas. In this series I chose blue and yellow to represent two landscape elements for the figures to move through.
I did this painting named Recover in 2019. Now I can not look at it this series without seeing the Ukrainian flag. How is it that I chose the exact blue and yellow? The figures in this series represent for me a human struggle or passage through life, but in the context of the war on Ukraine, I am adding another layer of meaning, in my own mind. The figures do represent a resilience, which I pray for the people in Ukraine.
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Path
Artist statement for Carbon Art and Design Gallery
The Blue and Yellow Series in this exhibition is an observation of how symbolic youth-like figures transverse an allegorical yellow landscape. The landscape is fraught with fissures that the figures deal with in different ways. Some oblivious, trepidatious, contemplative, or joyful.
The larger paintings in this exhibition are playing with different scenarios of how these same youth - like figures deal with a mysterious pile of figures and objects.
Generally, there are two objects on the canvas; the pile of amorphous compilations and the figure dealing with it. These encounters happen on a plain but colourful background with no context such as landscape to contextualize them. The figure is somewhat child-like and ephemeral, not completely pulled together, always in the process of figuring out what is going on.
The actions of this figure, dealing with their cache of life experiences, varies from contemplation, avoidance, being thrown around, trying to hang on, grappling with it, abandoning it. The paintings are about perspective, assessing, and calculating some sort of order or understanding.
New Releases Exhibition
Artist Statement
This series of paintings came about after a difficult life experience. One day I walked into my studio, grabbed a canvas and blurted out a painting to express my frustrations, etc. It felt good. It depicted a figure walking away from a messy pile of figurative images in which I buried specific literal thoughts. I had got something off my chest, and once more noted the therapeutic role that creating art can play.
This painting ended up hanging in a fairly busy office and almost everyone who came in commented on it, and reacted to it, related to it without knowing the specific story. I was curious about what these people were seeing in it, and it became clear that I had hit upon an experience that was more generic. Playing with this idea, I created different scenarios of how we deal with this mysterious pile of figures and objects.
Generally, there are two objects on the canvas; the pile of amorphous compilations and the figure dealing with it. These encounters happen on a plain but colourful background with no context such as landscape to contextualize them. The figure is somewhat child-like and ephemeral, not completely pulled together, always in the process of figuring out what is going on.
The actions of this figure, dealing with their cache of life experiences, varies from contemplation, avoidance, being thrown around, trying to hang on, grappling with it, abandoning it. The paintings are about perspective, assessing, and calculating some sort of order or understanding.
I hope that there is an element of humour or whimsy in these paintings, because, God forbid we take ourselves too seriously.
