I make drawings and prints in black and white. The drawings are charcoal on paper and the prints intaglio, etching and aquatint. The subject is usually a location in Cleveland, Ohio, or its surroundings, with particular attention to the lake. The imagery is always collected with a 35mm camera and color film, which seems to offer more information from which to choose. Although I use no photomechanical or tracing process, photography plays an important conceptual role, enforcing an implacable objectivity that accepts whatever presents itself to the camera, without regard to human intention. Composition takes place in the studio, where the images are cropped or combined in the process of drawing.

My goal is to give the visual experience of our everyday surroundings the suggestive power of abstract painting, making the picture a theater for the viewer's response, a mental landscape in which the imagination and memory can wander. I look for imagery where change is slow, sentiment is absent, and chips are down: the confrontation of the natural with the constructed landscape, the eroded boundary of the shore and the lake, and the weathered remains of urban architecture and industry.

born: 1942, Boston, MA

education

Yale University, BA, MFA 1968

selected awards/honors

Ohio Individual Artists Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council, 2008
Ohio Individual Artists Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council, 2003
Ohio Individual Artists Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council, 1998
Cleveland Arts Prize, 2000

selected publications

International Drawing Annual 2007. Cincinnati, Ohio: Manifest Creative Research Gallery
New Master Drawings; exhibition catalogue. Akron, Ohio: Akron Art Museum, 2005
New American Paintings. Boston, Open Sudios Press, 1999
Form and Structure:Twentieth Century Work from the Addison Collection, Addison Gallery of American Art, 1998

selected solo or two-person exhibits

Laurence Channing: New Drawings, The Bonfoey Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio, 2006
Laurence Channing: New Drawings, The Bonfoey Gallery, 2003
Laurence Channing: New Drawings, The Bonfoey Gallery, 2001
Dream Streets: The Urban Landscapes of Laurence Channing and Douglas Lucak, MOCA Cleveland, 1999

selected group shows

Delineate: Drawings by Laurence Channing, Julie Friedman, Charles Kanwischer, George Mauersberger, Ken Nevadomi, Robert Robbins, and Lowell Tolstedt, The Bonfoey Company, Cleveland, 2007
New Master Drawings, Akron Art Museum, 2005
16th Annual Works on Paper Show, Reeves Contemporary at the 7th Regimental Armory, New York, NY, 2004
Charcoal Drawings: Judith Foosaner, Ethan Murrow, Elzbieta Sikorska, Laurence Channing, Reeves Contemporary, New York, NY, 2003