"I invite you to experience the fluid, organic world of my paintings and collages - colorful, luminous, and otherworldly. "
Biography:
Laura Stack is a Minneapolis, MN artist who creates abstract ink collages, murals, and hard-edge paintings. In addition to her studio practice, she is Art faculty at the University of Minnesota, Art Department, where she teaches Drawing and Painting. Stack's artwork is recognized through national and international exhibitions and corporate and private art collections.
MEET LAURA:
I explore the awe-inspiring complexity of the natural world and the underlying forces that create it. I'm fascinated with developmental biology and the contradiction that living things can now embody synthetic elements. When engaged in painting, I imagine otherworldly living forms and environments, both microscopic and human scale. Fractal patterns, mushrooms, and coral reefs inspire the imagery as well as geologic processes such as lava flow and mineral formations. My artwork suggests a frozen moment in the process of becoming, evolving towards an amalgam of something both natural and artificial.
My painting practice moves between control and intuitive improvisation. In my ink collages, I begin with a detailed ink drawing of a specific natural form. As it’s applied, I coax the ink across the paper’s surface, corralling, halting spread, and encouraging its direction. I Then cut these ink paintings into shapes for collage, creating an imagined microscopic living form or a large expanding landscape mural. My hard-edge, Op Art paintings express the color, pattern, and movement I observe in nature coalescing with the saccharine, plastic hues of the synthetic world.
