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LARRAINE
I grew up in central Pennsylvania, where the only art I saw was quilts, and I’ve spent most of my adult years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I currently live in Oakland, CA with my husband and two kids, just down the street from my three hundred or so elementary art students. Throughout my work I use the language of textiles, which has traditionally marked the tension of creating time and space in women’s lives. My work comes directly out of the fragmentation of contemporary urban life; in the found spaces between juggling children, teaching jobs, housework, and an iPhone. Like a quilter’s piecing of fabric scraps, I collage together the simplest domestically gathered materials. Through processes marked by repetition, I harness the rhythms of everyday interruption and constraint into something whole and hopefully, sublime. Then I explore the emotionally charged nature of time and memory by building up layers of color around the collage. I push the encaustic paint past control and let the colors pool and blend. Then I scrape and scratch through the layers, not knowing exactly what layers will be revealed and therefore remembered. I earned my Bachelor’s of Art (Studio) from California State University at Hayward (now East Bay) and a Masters in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. My work is in corporate collections including at Cushman/Wakefield in Minneapolis and Sutter Health at the new Cathedral Hill Hospital in San Francisco. |