Lou Ann reineke
This group of oil paintings suggests the landscape and the organic, but is strongly rooted in the abstract and the gesture. The imagery employs a variety of scale and points of view, as if a camera lens is zooming in for detail or panning out for depth. I rebel against the technical constraints of the digital environment (where I live as a graphic designer, relying on grids and linking vector points with a mouse or stylus) and revel in the hands-on accidental strokes and colors that give rise to the next mark on the canvas. The constant manipulation is the same process whether digital or manual. Parts of the composition call out to be changed or adjusted, while others sit properly and perfectly upon first placement. For me, at some moment, similar to cropping a scene on your camera, the whole comes into focus as a finished piece. While making that journey, I constantly look for the play in the history of the layers of lines or marks: residual strokes, smudges, smears, splashes, and erasures that complement the crispness of essential sharp lines and tones. The directive energy of angles and curves in the varying degrees of abstraction refers, perhaps, to the life of plants, the suggestion of movement, the hint of or reference to a recognizable species or place.