Linda Laino

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Bio:

Linda Laino is a visual artist and writer who has been making art in one form or another for over 45 years. With an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, she was influenced by language from a young age, and moves between painting and writing in search of the connections and the crossover. In recent years, she has been making art around the world at residencies in France, Spain, New Mexico and most recently, Maine. In June, she will travel to Greece where she was awarded a grant for a month-long stay to paint on the island of Skopelos. Her poems and prose have been published with distinction in many small presses and anthologies, most recently in”La Presa” out of Guanajuato City. Her poem, “Poem at Sixty” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. Originally from Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia, since 2012, she has lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where the color and flavor blow her mind daily.

Linda Laino/Artist Statement

I approach art-making as an investigation. My paintings are not planned and never attempt to tell a story. The narratives evolve as a by-product of my subject matter and process, coupled with my response. Rooted in nature and biology, I rely on intuitive associations, remembered forms, repeat patterns, and chance encounters with my chosen materials to provide structure and visual vocabulary. While I  paint mainly with watercolor on rice paper— exploiting the transparent qualities of both— I don’t believe in a hierarchy of materials and will use whatever media that makes the image feel more convincing. To that end, my arsenal also includes gouache, charcoal, graphite, conte, wax crayons, ink, and acrylic.

While my paintings have always been representational, during the pandemic, I returned to  figures, exploring unusual ways they might interact with various forms of nature or biology: animal, plant, and human. These figures appear to merge with the organic forms physically, psychologically or metaphorically. I’ve always been enamored with the idea that as humans, we are nature, and so it is a matter of “like meeting like”.

In my practice I attempt to map where I’ve been. This results in a surface that not only exploits the qualities of different media but also different levels of finish. I prefer to let the viewer see the history of my thought process.

I like to think of the visual layering of my images as similar to the way we hear sound in our daily lives. Incongruous sounds enter and exit our space without consent resulting in a tapestry of song that needs no composer. We encounter the world visually in the same way, but mostly in a blur, unconscious and un-awake. I hope to harness the stillness of that moving picture in an effort to arrest the viewer and create a vivid sense of experience.