Ashe Laughlin

Artist's Statement

In my painting, I employ a heavy impasto of oil paint on canvas, linen, or wood, to achieve a layered, highly textured surface. The physicality of the accumulating paint provides spatial depth, movement, and illusion through which forms materialize and dematerialize. The paintings have a duality that can be viewed both as pure abstraction and as spatially formative images. I try to engage the viewer to see something new upon each viewing and to play with the space of a painting to allow for multiple interpretations of image.

In my drawings, I am also very interested in a complex layering of line and form to create works with a quality of spatial illusion.  My drawings are generally  figurative in nature and rely on the complexity of line to describe dense space.   In my most recent series of drawings, entitled “January 29^th,” I used the obituary section of the local newspaper as a starting point.  This series encompassed all of the photos of the deceased represented in the paper on a given day. In viewing these photographs, I am left with the sense that with a person’s death some final images representing the individual are all that is left.  I am also intrigued by the idea that through the series, these unknown people’s images have a place in our consciousness even after the newspaper is discarded.