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 After attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass., Lauren King was admitted to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA where, in 2005, she graduated with distinction, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree; she was also chosen to be on the Dean’s List for four consecutive years. Ms. King’s work has been displayed in several exhibitions at Art Center, both in individual and group shows. Originally from Belleville, IL, she currently lives in Los Angeles.
Ms. King’s work is comprised mostly of drawings and watercolor paintings, and the gradation between the two. She uses her art to create her own world, allowing herself to not only re-experience the past, a memory or a place she longs to be, but to realize her dreams in the physical space that a canvas provides. Most recently, her work has highlighted European cities, particularly Paris. While the City of Lights has been the theme of a myriad of paintings for hundreds of years, all unique vantage points may seem exhausted to some. Ms. King feels quite the contrary. She believes Paris is a place of possibilities and opportunities – a blank page on which her innermost feelings of desire, longing and romanticism can be expressed.
For me, painting is about a kind of escapist fantasy; it is about a world of my own making. Painting allows me to enter into a time in the past: a personal memory, a place I long to be. The memories are those of the imaginary, they are about the ideal, and a longing for a past that is unattainable. I am also interested in painting as a place to act out my desires, for it is the only physical place they can exist.
My recent work has been both drawing and watercolor. Watercolor has uncontrollable and fixed characteristics: replacing while preserving the surface. The images can be very precise and controlled in one moment and then in others seem to fall apart into a pool of pigment. The images are very detailed and the long duration I have with them allows me to inhabit that space mentally and emotionally.
Why, Oh Why Do I (2005) is based on the French toile fabric: it is a pattern that is set up with outdoor scenes and circular windows opening up into interior spaces. For me the decorative is linked with an interior space that often times mirrors that of ones interior self. Images in the painting repeat themselves, appear again from different views or vanish and leave empty spaces. One of the narratives in the painting is about its making, and its unfinished quality echoes the impossibility to ever get back to the place and time being depicted and longed for. Most of the images are of Paris, for me Paris is a place that has become inseparable with my interest in desire, longing and the romantic.
The paintings in Grand Tour (2004) are of European cities: places that have become so iconic that they are on the verge of being exhausted by their representation, they seem only exist to in the space of representation or seem not to exist at all, for sometimes you cannot get beyond your ideal version of them in your head. When looking at the paintings there is a sense of having-been-there, there is also a strong sense of longing for something lost.
The Souvenir series is a collection of painted ephemera kept from trips to Paris. The images are to scale and float in the middle of the page. There is an extream detail and looking: a reexamination of the objects, and of the past. Though they are very realistic there is a strong presence of the hand in the images, the imperfections allow for an intimate relationship. The paintings are as much about the act of keeping and collecting things to have to remember that time as they are a way to regain that time by repainting them. |
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As If It Did Not Know
They’d changed
(2005)
Pencil on paper
57cm x 57cm
Fashioned a Castel of June
(2005)
Watercolor on paper
57cm x 57cm
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