Lawre Stone

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.

Stone lives and works in Columbia County, New York.