LAURA NEWMAN | ARTIST STATEMENT

My studio windows look out over an open expanse of sky where flocks of pigeons rise up and circle around each other, catching the light as they turn. Depending upon the time of day, the birds look like holes in the fabric of the sky, or firework displays, but in reality they are participants in a competitive game in which each flock's owner tries to capture members of another flock by confusing them into returning to the wrong home. 

I am interested in a kind of space which is fresh, airy, vast and open. The paintings are architectural in scale. They describe simple, theatrical places where geometry is heightened and there is play between flatness and spatial illusion. Each painting suggests a model or diagram, even as it evokes a particular, fictional place. When the paintings are grouped together, the viewer moves from one stagelike, abstract space to another.

I want my paintings to exist at the point where form takes on meaning--where a triangle can be read as a road in perspective, for example. Color is saturated and matte; space is warped; lines are active and almost three-dimensional. The scenes are reduced to sets, pressed against the picture plane, but at the same time imply a frictionless, vast landscape space. Suggestions of compression and restriction contrast with a sense of breaking free and soaring in thin air.