Laura's Project Statement: Laura Winn Clark’s realistic oil paintings feature fellow artists in the creative act; they reveal the unseen: the psychological realities, the social relationships and struggles that impact their work. Entering each subject’s world through conversation, documentation and reflection, the process of painting becomes an opportunity to ask meaningful questions and unearth esoteric wisdom. Slow thinking and uncertainty are center stage.
Blueprint in progress, Oil on Linen, 42” x 80”, 2023
“My goal here is to highlight the disparity between the plans we make and the realities that ensue.” – Laura Winn Clark
Karen Dolmanisth (in conversation with Laura Winn Clark via Zoom, 6/1/2023): “I was completely responding to the price paid to follow my vocation… Will I have children? Will I do all the family things? And will I take care of others? What is the timeframe? So I really felt like this notion of sacrifice was this interior of choices that the emerging woman artist is going to make and continue to make.”
Blueprint is a portrait of Karen Dolmanisth, a multi-media installation artist, working in her long-time studio – an expansive space in Florence, MA. We met in ArtLab; our continued conversations turned into a preliminary oil study, personal reflection, and a larger painting.
Back when I was studying architecture, I had this somewhat naïve idea that spaces – like a stage – could enable a certain narrative to unfold within them; academia supported the notion. Le Corbusier famously said, “Une maison est une machine-a-habiter”, ie, “A house is a machine for living.”
Of course, our lives aren’t static and it’s a chicken and egg kind of problem. What comes first, the space or the life? I think about the feedback loop - between our spaces, the work we make, the life we embody – and, with vision, how we slowly nudge these things towards our desires.
With this painting, titled Blueprint, marks express the transient light of a space animated by a particular person’s life: it features action, accumulation, and, as she’s an artist, her modes of expression.
The prototypical blueprint – invented in 1842 – transformed architectural drawings from hand-copied labors to enable accurate and unlimited reproductions. The process is based on photosensitive ferric compounds, the same chemicals as Prussian Blue. They were one small part in a move towards modularity and mass production and, with it, uniformity. I mention this because I think it is of note that feminist attitudes in architecture have often focused on the opposite: the individuality of needs, places and individuals. The color making blueprints – that Prussian Blue – came itself from an irregularity. The delightful text “The Secret Lives of Color” reports,
“Sometime between 1704 and 1706, in a dingy room in Berlin, a paint manufacturer and alchemist called Johann Jacob Diesbach was making up a batch of his signature cochineal red lake… when it came to the crucial stage, Diesbach realized he was out of potash. He bought some more from the nearest supplier and carried on, but something wasn’t right… his “red lake” solution turned first purple, then a deep blue.”
A happy accident. A mistaken chemical added.
My goal here in recounting the origins of Prussian Blue, blueprints themselves and this painting is to highlight the disparity between the plans we make and the realities that ensue. And I want to add a final complexity: what happens when our imaginations fail us? Our psychological reality sometimes seems fixed in the same way as our walls. But we know we can walk outside our studio. We are bigger than our space. We are bigger than the culture we live in. And we are bigger than even our own narrative.
Laura's Artist Statement: Laura Winn Clark’s realistic oil paintings feature fellow artists in the creative act; they reveal the unseen: the psychological realities, the social relationships and struggles that impact their work. Entering each subject’s world through conversation, documentation and reflection, the process of painting becomes an opportunity to ask meaningful questions and unearth esoteric wisdom. Slow thinking and uncertainty are center stage.