Lawre Stone

Lawre Stone was raised in New Jersey and remembers painting the iridescent colors of a polluted sky over the oil slicked Passaic River from her childhood bedroom. Images of nature compromised by human endeavor continue to inform her work.

Engaged in a conversation between interior worlds and physical experience, her paintings become a forum for charting tumultuous feelings, and the chaos, nuance and tones of everyday occurrences. The emergency of our time and an existential future, compel Stone to empathize with aspects of the natural world through color, image, shape and gesture. Each painting begins with the suggestion of a landscape-like space. Washes, spills and slabs of oil paint construct a space made from color. Backlit and shallow - she’s painting the illuminated middle ground, a space that languishes in limbo between the certainty of a vanishing point and the tangible clarity of sharp focus.

The images are a personal lexicon derived from remembered feelings related to observations of natural phenomenon. The petals of a dying flower, a vital organ in distress, a broken chunk of an iceberg, or the sounds of conversations between songbirds can inspire an image. For Stone, painting explores the unseen forces that propel and impede the structure of growth and destruction. A painting might suggest the tiny world under a microscope, a vast landscape, or the unseen space of the interior self. A paint heavy brush or the scrape of a knife can abruptly freeze gesture in space, preserving feeling and emotion.  

When systems break down, something hidden is revealed. Swipes of paint obliterate a form once revered. Stone is interested in finding what must be discarded and what must be carried forward. The un-seen contains both the beauty and the horror of what we have done. Painting is a portal to this unseen world.

Lawre Stone’s work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and has been reviewed in publications including,The New Art Examiner, The New York Times, and Art in America. She received an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Bard MFA, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently the Associate Director of Bard MFA.

Lawre Stone lives and paints in Columbia County, New York.

https://www.lawrestone.com/