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Laura Newman is an American abstract artist. She creates vivid, dynamic paintings that revel in a harmonious balance between gestural brushwork, hard-edge geometric spatial arrangements and layered, architectural compositions. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Newman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Education

Laura Newman earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and also studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Graduate Program. She has received fellowships and awards from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. An Associate Professor in the Art Department at Vassar College since 1998, she was previously on the faculty at The Yale University School of Art, Brown University, The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Pratt Institute and The Cooper Union School of Art.

Technique

Newman paints in a light-filled studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her practice includes large-scale canvases created primarily with oils and acrylics and smaller works on paper created with ink, watercolors and other mediums.

Her techniques include staining, pouring, and a combination of gestural and meticulous mark making. About her process, Newman has said, "My paintings often take specific qualities of particular places as points of departure, but I try to approach the image without preconceived ideas and to discover forms through improvisation."

Her finished paintings combine geometric delineations of space, ephemeral color fields, dynamic lines and organic forms, resulting in atmospheric images evocative of representational landscapes, but always opening up to something more, something beyond.

Newman's paintings may look like they are quickly made because she values a sense of freshness; But in reality they take a long time to complete. The artist starts by setting down rudiments of a visual idea, reworks the painting over and over until she achieves an image that she recognizes but that at the same time surprises her.

Inspiration

Newman often finds inspiration in the view out her studio window, which looks out at a large swath of sky over the city. The vastness of the open air juxtaposes with the intermingling of construction and deconstruction occupying the urban landscape. Her work often explores that interplay between the confinement of built environments and the freedom of open spaces. Elements of window frames sometimes inhabit her paintings, creating a sense of distance between spatial planes. Newman is interested in the interplay between representation and abstraction. She strives for a language of forms, lines, colors and spatial relationships that can be read both formally and abstractly or interpreted more broadly as fictional, illusionary environments.

Artist Statement

"A painting comes alive for me when I can feel the space in it. In my recent paintings, brushstrokes cohere into structures that serve as containers for space and fold together a range of approaches to form, among them hard-edged geometrical shapes, loose gestural dry brushed strokes of ink, and architectural references. Painting for me is about discovering an image. Through the process of working and reworking, layering and painting out, I attempt to locate a specific but unnamable place with its own rules of gravity and rhythm, that surprises me but I recognize."

Relevant quote

Sharon Butler, founder of the Two Coats of Paint project, wrote the following about Laura Newman in 2012:

“Laura Newman’s color has always been sweet but brittle...the seemingly casual color shapes pulsate, gnash, and hover, like the pigeons she watches outside her Williamsburg studio…[Newman’s paintings] at first delight, then purposely confuse our expectations, leaving us to sort out the point of view, the enigmatic shapes, and the hints of narrative on our own. These paintings are a gentle reminder that things aren’t always as they seem.”
 

Collections

Works by Laura Newman are in the permanent collections of multiple institutions, including those of Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM Corporation, Prudential Insurance Company and the University of Arizona.

Exhibitions

Laura Newman has exhibited in multiple solo exhibitions in New York as well as in group exhibitions in galleries and museums along the US East Coast and in Canada. Her work has been written about extensively, including in Artforum, The New York Times, and the Brooklyn Rail.