statement

"Meeting in Bryant Park" belongs to an ongoing series of intricate landscape drawings with figures appropriated from masterpieces of art. Past landscape drawings included contemporary figures from multiple photographs of the same space as the landscape image. The figures were used as compositional elements establishing scale or emphasis. To the viewer, these figures were passing strangers offering no engagement. While the appropriated figures in this work continue to be important compositional elements, their historical significance and visual meaning create a more complex relationship between time and place.

My research for this series involved works by major artists in the public domain and I looked for figures with visual characteristics that viewers could recognize and use to identify the source. The figures were also manipulated to fit the composition's perspective. The landscapes come from a collage of my own snapshots. The compositions are rarely vistas looking outward. Most often they are natural interior spaces framed by sky, land, foliage or architecture.

The act of drawing for me is simple, direct, a performance. The drawing itself is complicated. Like Chinese brush paintings, my pencil drawings are more about marks and patterns than any particular place. The realities of light and form captured in snapshot images are interpreted and abstracted to create a visual realism that is not at all real.

bio

born:1951, Evanston, Illinois

education:

University of Illinois, Urbana, MFA, 1975
University of Illinois, Urbana, BFA, 1973

selected awards/honors

The Martha and Merritt deJong Memorial Artist-in-Residence, The Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, 2009

selected publications

"Reinventing the Real:The Art of Laurin Notheisen," catalog, Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Evansville, IN, 2009
"Border to Border," 10th Biennial Exhibition, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN, catalog p.5, 2005
"30th Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition, catalog, p.52, 2005
"Looking At Painting, Part 1, Realism," by Robert Tharsing, KET production, Lexington KY, 2001

selected solo or two-person exhibits

"Reinventing the Real:The Art of Laurin Notheisen", retrospective exhibit, Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Evansville, IN, 2009
"Laurin Notheisen and Ivan Schieferdecker", new works, Capitol Arts Center, Bowling Green, KY, 2006
"Landscapes: prints, drawings and paintings", Ronald L. Barr Gallery, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN, 2006
"A Painter's Point of View: Four Solo Exhibitions", Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, Owensboro, KY, 2003

selected group shows

Midstates Art Exhibition, Evansville Museum of Arts & Science, Evansville, IN, 2008
Americas 2000: All Media, Northwest Art Center, Minot State University, Minot, ND, 2007
Ever-Changing Landscape, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY,2005
Border to Border, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN, 2005