Laura Newman

About

Laura Newman is an American abstract artist. She creates vivid, dynamic paintings that revel in a harmonious balance between gestural brushwork, hard-edge geometric spatial arrangements and layered, architectural compositions. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Newman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Education Laura Newman earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and also studied at the California Institute of the Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Graduate Program. She has received fellowships and awards from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. An Associate Professor in the Art Department at Vassar College since 1998, she was previously on the faculty at The Yale University School of Art, Brown University, The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Pratt Institute and The Cooper Union School of Art. Technique Newman paints in a light-filled studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her practice includes large-scale canvases created primarily with oils and acrylics and smaller works on paper created with ink, watercolors and other mediums. Her techniques include staining, pouring, and a combination of gestural and meticulous mark making. About her process, Newman has said, " My paintings often take specific qualities of particular places as points of departure, but I try to approach the image without preconceived ideas and to discover forms through improvisation. " ... Her finished paintings combine geometric delineations of space, ephemeral color fields, dynamic lines and organic forms, resulting in atmospheric images evocative of representational landscapes, but always opening up to something more, something beyond. Newman's paintings may look like they are quickly made because she values a sense of freshness; but in reality they take a long time to complete. The artist starts by