Annie Lapin
From Interview:
How do you start a painting, Annie? I see remnants of photographic imagery and reality but am not convinced that you’re looking at anything when you make it.
On all of my larger works, I work from my head. It is a process of reacting to the image… layering, and allowing it to develop is if it were a photo in emulsion. I also do a lot of watercolor exercises, which tend to be diptychs on little pieces of paper. For these I often paint from photos of current events or other things that seem prevalent in the media. By doing this I get to recharge both my mind and my hand with the tropes of realism, quotations of photographic lighting and reformulations of the images that we all think we know so well. Then those things come out naturally when I compose my larger works on canvas, and I am more able to subvert them because I am not looking directly at a photograph.
Does the euphoria come from reflecting the world or discovering or being able to depict things you never imagined? I say this because your paintings have a surreal/imaginary quality to them.
I am less interested in the depiction of “things,” real or imagined, than I am in the way certain images play with our minds at various points in history and culture. In my most optimistic moments, I sometimes believe that painting has the capacity to provoke a confrontation with the process of cognition, on both an individual and a societal level. The imaginary or surreal quality of my work probably is a natural bi-product of my experiments toward that elusive end. -The Huffington Post, May 17th, 2008 (read more)
Leave a Reply