March 4, 2021
Reflections upon becoming a resident of Pennsylvania
Lou Ann Reineke is a painter living in Philadelphia, PA. She began her art career in Philadelphia, earning a BFA in Illustration from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1976. While traveling soon after, she fell in love with the Wasatch mountains, the Utah desert air, and the allure of hiking and camping in the relative wilderness of the West. She spent 44 years living and working in Salt Lake City, Utah, nurturing dual careers in graphic design and fine art, roaming between the two worlds of pixels and paints, borrowing freely from each. She is most known for her self-portrait painted in 1980 for the Grand Beehive Exhibition at the Salt Lake Art Center, appropriately titled “Self-portrait with Beehive: Reflections upon Becoming a Resident of Utah”.
Though long retired from print publication design, her lifelong experience as a freelancer and eighteen years as an editorial designer and illustrator at the Deseret News in Salt Lake City continues to influence her fine art. Reineke’s participation in selected exhibitions include many Utah venues such as the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, The Salt Lake Art Center, Art Access Gallery, Phillips Gallery, Finch Lane Gallery, Kimball Art Center, and the Gallery at Library Square in the Main Salt Lake City Library.
In September, 2020, she returned to Philadelphia, trading her Salt Lake house for a city apartment, and moving her studio into the re-purposed Reading Railroad building on Spring Garden Street. There, she continues to devote her time solely to oil painting. She is thrilled to revisit the vast history found within Philadelphia’s streets and architecture and to rekindle her own East Coast past.
Reineke credits the start of her passion for painting in oils to workshops she attended, 2002 and 2003, in Helper, Utah, under the tutelage of David Dornan, Paul Davis, and Tony Smith. Dornan, in particular, inspired the development of her process of mark-making, experimentation, and “attacking the surface” of the canvas – mixed with her preference for leaving some areas open and airy while making others dense and opaque. Though her work transitioned to an abstract expressionist and gestural style, she still employs some realism, borrowing elements from the natural world. The happenstance randomness of fallen leaves, close-cropped, becomes a formal study in composition, a snapshot of nature. The intricate petals of a flower become a loose and energetic color sketch. A branch becomes a dense forest of flickering lines.
