Bio: Lauren Edmond painter New York City Statement | Present | Past | Future | Contact To receive invitations to shows and exhibits by email, please send email to: lauren@laurenedmond.com by clicking this link or pasting the address into your email program. Artist Statement: Green is more than a color In 1992, I made a conscious decision to stop using oil paint because it is a petroleum byproduct and toxic to the natural environment. Now I make oil paintings without using petroleum by-products! Find out how! I am inspired to paint scenes when I see something eternal in the present moment, or the mythology in the moment. Within the constant flux of contemporary culture, some things remain the same because they evoke emotions that underlie and reveal our basic human nature, which is constant although evolving. Eternal images help to ground us, allowing us to experience the peace of inner security and true confidence, even in a time of great change. Every era deserves to be represented aesthetically and my goal is to provide an artistic mirror of our present time that evokes the feeling of our times by blending myth and art. For the past 16 years, I have used a computer to make my paintings, a further reflection of our current era. Click here to read about the emerging field of digital painting on Wikipedia. And click here for the NYTimes article about David Hockney, another tree painter who now uses the same process; Mr Hockney paints on a Mac using Painter software. Computer-as-medium also allows me to print perfect reproductions of the originals without having to adjust the colors. And that ekeeos prices affordable, helping more people to become art collectors of original artwork. And, it keeps the environment cleaner. Oil paints are made from heavy metals and petroleum byproducts, and support the oil industry. Although according to Nicholas Kristof writing in the NYTimes on June 26, 2010, the tantalum used in computers, especially in Apple iPhones, are "dirty minerals" mined in the Congo, amidst violent wars. My choice of media is a statement. Using the computer changes the impact on the environment. Computer also pose an environmental threat, and I recycle my computers, and encourage everyone to recycle properly. In a departure from my abstract work of the 1990's, I returned to my "roots" as a representational landscape/cityscape painter because, as a society, I feel that we have become too alienated from the natural world. We take it for granted. We make excuses. We think nature will just "be there". We disregard climate change because we don't "see" it. So the glaciers are melting and the bats have disappeared! We don't want to notice! It's just "supposed" to be there. We zip by nature every day without looking. Who cares about leaves? They're everywhere, nothing could be more mundane and trite! Recently, a gallerist looked at my new (2009) paintings of upstate NY, and wondered, aloud, why I would have bothered to paint them, because they "just look like what it is, a bunch of blue and green trees and earth." Exactly! And that's my point, as an artist. As a culture have agreed to hide behind facades of ideas and systems that do not represent who we really are, so that we have become separated from who we are, able to be bought and sold, and while that may not seem significant, not knowing how or what you feel makes it impossible to live a whole life or have meaningful relationships with others. Or the planet. You really do become an automaton operating on automatic pilot. I just found this article in commondreams.org which was published by The Guardian/UK on August 12, 2009, reporting on the future of green technology as scientists are finding ways to use "artificial leaves" for clean power. Maybe leaves will be a bigger hero than we realize! As the climate warms, we are becoming more like insects, flitting around to whatever is most "catchy." And at that point, it's true, who cares? Opening the heart remains a valid and necessary function of art. Beautiful art is currently regarded as trite, stereotyped, unimaginative, unoriginal. That alone is significant and very revealing of our cultural values. The current preference for conceptual art explores humanity's dark side, to the point it makes it seem socially acceptable and ok. Here's my problem with conceptual art at this time in history. Beauty, or positivity, is a conscious choice. By default, we can be negative and dark, and giving our dark side more attention will escalate the negativity. Art that is beautiful or positive is uplifting because it shows you have a choice. Giving in to the negativity desensitizes us to the social malignancies that plague our society, making evil acts or slander seem acceptable. It is not satisfactory to harm children, wage wars for no reason, or tell lies so you can continue a system that does not work although there are alternatives. We give money to industries that pollute instead of seek solutions; we choose materialism over wisdom; we look ahead to some future time instead of being fully alive in the present. Making beautiful paintings is THE MOST positive and evolutionary statement I can make, as an artist and as a human living on Earth at this time. And so I continue to choose to be opti-mystic! And I hope you enjoy the show, which is always growing and evolving. Present: Please visit the homepage of this website for info on Current Exhibitions. How the paintings on this website are made I paint on a Macintosh compouter with a 24-inch screen. The software is Painter 9.1 and 10. To create my paintings, I start with a blank canvas (at 320 dpi) and use a Wacom graphic tablet that plugs into my computer (with a USB cable). Using "oil paint" media, available in Painter, I paint with a stylus that i have crafted into a brush. I have full control over my tools, including color, brush size, and opacity. These paintings are fully original -- they are NOT Photoshop-enhanced photographs! Photographs are NOT embedded or layered in these paintings (not that there's anything wrong with that:) it's just not my process). I print high resolution, 300 dpi, archival pigment prints using archival 300 pound cotton rag, which gives better color saturatation and therefore depth. Most of my paintings are intended to be larger and can be printed onto cotton rag watercolor paper using archival pigments, or onto canvas in a process called Giclee printing. Spending time painting in the Catskill Mountains in the 1990s made me a witness to the toxic strain oil painting places on the environment as well as the health of the artist. I have a congenital skin condition that rebelled against oil paint and all the solvents it involves. I even tried gringing my own paint and using pure oils. My skin said NO. After searching other media to replace oils, painting digitally is a challenge that fully engages me as a painter. As a space-challenged NYer, using a computer gives me a studio right in my small apartment. I can even take my laptop anywhere and plein aire digitally. And, there is no color adjustment necessary for perfect prints. As technology integrates into our culture, digital art will continue to gain acceptance, making my choice of medium a non-issue. The scalability of the images makes them versatile for many environments, from greeting cards to murals to the right size for your home or business. Please Note: The paintings displayed on this website are small, low-res (72 dpi) versions of the originals and are only intended for viewing online. It's ok to send or share them, put them on your desktop, enjoy them! Just no commercial use, that is copyright protected. Past: Gallery artist: 301 Houston (1983-84) Gallery artist: Leonora Datil (1993-94) I was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1952. My family appreciated art. We went on frequent trips to the nearby Brooklyn Museum and there were many accomplished artists in my family, including my aunt. My mom always painted and my grandma had a baby grand piano and could play Chopin without music, she just figured it out. I started playing the piano at age 3 and had lessons by age 5. I've been singing for 32 years and have fun in the soprano range. I started as a sculptor at age 2 in the sandbox in Prospect Park. I started painting oil-on-canvas at age 13 and majored in fine art in high school (Reginald Flood, teacher and mentor). I graduated with honors from the University of Buffalo in 1975 with a degree in Literature, preparing for a career in publishing. But something was missing. So I studied drawing and painting at the Art Student's League of NY from 1977-79 (studied with: Thomas Ferguson, Robert Beverly Hale, Gustav Rehberger, and Marshall Glasier, Milton's brother). Series have included: My backyard, NYC backyardscapes 1977-1980. All kinds of assorted oil paintings, drawings, pastels, and sculpture from then to 1988. Paintings from the Catskills (1988-89), Swirl (1990-93), Liquid Bones (1992-94), Flying World (1994-96), artcharts.com (1996-2005), and T-Square Park (2005-2009), Woodstock and Saugerties (2007-2009) Artists that inspire my work include: Cezanne, Franz Mark, Andre Derain, Edgar Degas, Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Hopper, Diana E. Birnbaum (my aunt), and all the wonderful contemporary representational painters, links to come! Future: My plan for the future is to find gallery representation so more people see my work. I would like to show my paintings full size, printed on rag and/or canvas in limited editions. Further, I would like to encourage donations for the care and preservation of the trees of the NYC parks, especially and starting with Tompkins Square, my local park and muse. In the summer of 2006, I took a step towards this goal by participating in the East Village Parks Conservancy Show. Contact Information Lauren Edmond lauren@laurenedmond.com 151 1st Avenue #109 New York, NY 10003 212-979-1996: cell 917-829-6450: voice For more information about these prints, please visit the ordering information page on this website.