Statement
Tailoring outsized stories onto small panels or canvases, I paint to locate myself in this piercing and mutable world and share my perception with others. Signs, symbols, ancient and iconic art, performances, advertisements, all are free to evolve beyond familiar associations.
Crossie, having escaped crosswalk signals, grapples with unexpected situations. Venus, stunted by her magnificent obesity and inward gaze, has life and agility. Willow Ware, transcending pattern, becomes a landscape sheltering troubled souls. Drying laundry and ghost signs merge forming new entities. All is fair game.
Through working, dualities fuse, finding resolution in concrete form. Nature or nurture, fate or freewill, linear time versus the chaotic tempo of memory, like hearing the simultaneous sounds of an ambulance and church bells, how might I create coherence from chaos? Here is the world we understand as real, while under the surface fairytales run their uncontrollable stories through our psyches. Symbols from visual culture come to life, free from the fixedness of intended purpose. The rectangular area of a painting is a divine field enabling me to create wholeness from the totality of outer and inner stimuli.
I work on mostly smaller pieces. Due to time constraints, I work at night. I have so many paintings and drawings in me, working in intimate scale allows me to explore many ideas when I have limited time. I focus on making images that unfold over time, complex images that reveal more mystery with repeated viewing.
The poetry came like a flash flood. Images painted the night before emerged in the morning as poetry. The synergy between the two forms helped me to delve deeper into the enigma, the painting’s central concern. Desiring to fuse them into one form, I created the poem videos.
Biography
As a child, Laurie Heller Marcus studied at the Arts Students League with the abstract painter Agnes Hart (1912-1979). She later majored in art and anthropology at the University of New Hampshire and attended the New York Studio School for Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been presented in a variety of exhibitions, including in projects that were curated by Sean Scully, Bill Jenson, Michael Brenson, Richard Flood, Richard Shaw, Dan Cameron, Glenn Goldberg, Malado Baldwin, Maia Ibar, Jeannie Weissglass and David Humphrey. Last spring and summer, her films SLINGS & ARROWS and DELILAH were featured on Dreamers Welcome TV. She is based in New York City.