Laurie Nye: My River Runs to Thee

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present, "My River Runs to Thee," an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist, Laurie Nye. Nye's new works are about visionary space, her relationship to place and feelings of belonging.

Laurie Nye's second show at Philip Martin Gallery takes its title from Emily Dickinson's 1861 poem of the same name. Read as a conversation between lovers, or a conversation between the individual and the divine, Emily Dickinson's work presents the ebb and flow between The River and The Sea, exchanging their waters in the cycle of life. For Laurie Nye, Emily Dickinson's poem is about a sense of belonging wherever the flow takes her. "Water is my metaphor around the fluidity of place, continuity of visionary threads, and personal symbols and my own clear lexicon.” "I'm feeling very expressive in this show,”  Laurie Nye comments, going on to suggest that in painting a given scene, she is considering ""how color and gesture create meaning and feeling.”

Laurie Nye's works consider a range of Visionary approaches, particularly those of the Nabis. They open up a world to her, and to us, allowing for a conversation across the picture plane emphasizing feeling and looking, sensing and responding, careful thought and committed engagement. Nye pulls both from memory and interpretations of specific locations, many of which she visits again and again, fascinated by the light filtering through the woods, the undulation of clouds, the leaves of a given tree, the patterns in a pond or a brook. In a chaotic world, contemplating nature is Nye’s escapist strategy.

Nye lives and works in both California and Tennessee, returning regularly to locations in Tennessee where she grew up - a pond built by her father, a river on which she fished as a child, the fountain in a park by her mother's house. She has also begun looking more deeply at her California surroundings, connecting to the land and visionary openness of Los Angeles, that has directly affected her palette and scale.  In Nye’s work, these places - real, imagined, both - are figured through motifs, many of which are repeated and reworked, constantly thought through from one painting to the next. For instance, in the painting, “Fall at Echo Park Lake”, Nye explores recurring motifs of reflections and flowing fountains. There is a feeling of improvisational gesture that carries through the composition. Through a sensorial color palette and repeated patterns she alludes to an existential experience of viewing nature.

Laurie Nye has a background in surface design, and on-going love for textiles and fabrics. She often thinks about the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop), an artistic collective that sought to explore the connection between painting and practices like surface design. In Nye's work, color, line and shape are deeply interconnected. They build a sense of "all-overness" that refers to both painting and textiles. Nye’s line pulls from the muscle memory of years of drawing. She maps out and explore motifs, with stacked banding of color and form to creating an encompassing emotional experience.