CLC is excited to announce the opening of the exhibition, “Invasive Beauty: Painting the Displaced Species of Columbia County, NY,” featuring the paintings of local artist Lawre Stone.
The dynamic series of paintings explores the impact of invasive species on the region and will be on view through November 7, 2024. Both paintings on view are available for purchase, with a portion of the proceeds benefitting CLC.
“It’s been an incredible partnership,” says Mallory Schultz, Communications & Outreach Coordinator. “The work of Stone is not only stunning, but its exploration of invasive species in the county makes it especially relevant to the work of CLC, caring for the land.”
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by CREATE Council on the Arts.
About the artist:
Lawre Stone is a New York-based artist who combines natural imagery and the language of abstraction in otherworldly landscapes that explore relationships between interior worlds and physical experience. Rooted in traditions of spiritual abstraction, her paintings, works on paper, and textile works empathize with aspects of the natural world through color, image, shape, and gesture. Washes, spills, and slabs of paint construct a space made of saturated color. Within this forum, she joins the cognitive practice of drawing with the emotion of painted gestures.
The images are a personal lexicon derived from remembered feelings related to observations of natural phenomena. The petals of a dying flower, a vital organ in distress, a broken chunk of an iceberg, or the shimmering surface of a polluted waterway can inspire an image. A painting might suggest the tiny world under a microscope, a vast landscape, or the unseen space of the interior self.
For over twenty years, her paintings and works on paper have been inspired by a modernist matriarchy, including Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions from nature, Agnes Pelton’s esoteric landscapes, Joan Mitchell’s explosive brushstrokes, and Elizabeth Murray’s vibrant, shaped canvases. Following their legacy, Stone continues to pursue abstract paintings’ ability to express observed and internalized experience. She’s interested in finding what must be discarded and what must be carried forward while expanding notions of beauty.
Lawre Stone received an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently the Associate Director of Bard MFA and serves on the Board of Directors of Millay Arts. Lawre Stone lives and works in Columbia County, New York.
