Lauren White

I work primarily in oil paints, but I am a jack of all trades in the art world.  I have a degree in Visual Arts from Western Kentucky University.  I currently reside in south-central Kentucky.       The world is not perfect.  Our lives are not perfect.  Neither will ever be perfect, but we must persevere and flourish, nonetheless.  The world and the smaller concept of society in which we live is essentially a lie.  We are told that all will be well, anything is possible, nothing bad will happen to us….these are all lies.  Our future is limitless; this is what we are told.  This is a lie as well.  Our future is essentially death. Our present is difficulty, grief, and loss.  Our past haunts us.  These are the truths of the world in which we live, yet we must trudge onward and find ways to deal with the things that happen to us.  We must make our lives purposeful during the time between birth and death.     My work focuses on these issues.  The subject matter concentrates upon separation, grief, loss, decay, and the unavoidable eminency of death.  I prefer to work on a rather large scale, because I think my work would have no impact on a small scale and would probably be considered juvenile.  I choose to use a vivid color palette as a juxtaposition for morbid imagery.     Sources for my work include a broad range of life experiences, such as making difficult choices, losing integral parts of myself, the death of a part of my future, and the ultimate realization that all is not well, but I must persist.  Sculptural images influence my work more so than two-dimensional images.  This is due to the fact that my paintings have a sculpturesque quality and the building up of texture, as well as shape.  I am also investigating the medium of collage.  I feel that collage has much to offer by way of helping me to convey the ideas that I am addressing in my work and I plan to attempt to integrate collage and oil painting into as cohesive a manner as possible, as it pertains to my work.     I’ve been pondering the graphic repetitiveness of the technological and virtual worlds in which we live.  It has brought on a decay of our social fabric, our social selves, our mental selves, and our familial selves.  It will ruin us, yet we are compelled to subject ourselves to it.  We are bound by the need for interaction with others, yet this technology and its repetitive nature tends to do the opposite.  It further separates us from the interaction we so crave.  We do not long for virtual interaction, we long for the present, the here and now, the touch of something tangible.  Yet, we remain stagnant in the world of the virtual.  I think these concepts are beginning to manifest in my work and I look forward to investigating them.     As for the viewer, my intention is to seduce her/him both by attraction to and repulsion from the imagery of the work.  I would like for the viewer to feel confronted and visually assaulted.  I want the viewer to ask “Why?” and then realize that she/he is looking at the reality of the world in which we live.