Lisa Loudermilk's Artwork - 2024+
About the art
I paint and sometimes suspend other flat art materials between thin, clear, and slick barrier coats. This keeps new paint from smearing up what’s below. It’s also easier to remove drying paint to selectively expose all previous layers to compound the image. Instead of using brushes, I modify common household tools to apply and slice away wet paint for crisper edges.
Compositions aren't pre-plotted because it’s more engaging and challenging to anticipate and reassess how colors, values, and forms interact with each other. I make and solve complex aesthetic puzzles for a living.
Artist statement
Artist statements sometimes rely on creative writing afterward to give artwork faux social/political/aesthetic/$ value. And there's also a lot of time to think about yourself during the hours spent watching artwork develop.
-I identify my work in the context of historical modernism - specifically minimalism and linear abstract art. I've even convinced myself that I have created penultimate irony by “baroquing up” minimalism. For me, the inevitable progression of working with minimalist principles means degrading them by compounding many lines and shapes, mixing organic textures into hard-edge linear forms, and even adding previously declassé shiny stuff.
But my art history education and original minimalist art itself are many decades surpassed. And MCM artists aren’t the only reasons that we all know shapes and lines. Our species mostly organizes itself with linear forms. Artists got hip to those beautiful forms over a hundred years ago.
-It's as much integrated circuitry as it is crazy quilting. But these are after-the-fact comparisons.
-The busy energy resembles my mind struggling to complete a single five-word thought. But it also illustrates, for me, perfectly achieved balance and harmony of innumerable little details.
-There is an honest origin story for any artwork I make with lines. There once were overwhelming circumstances and painting simple lines over and over was good therapy. But should that really give my work more gravita$$$?
Actually, I am just making what I think looks good and meaningfully different right now.
Thanks,
Lisa Loudermilk
CV etc- 2000-2025
How can a well-collected artist have no real CV/resume/web presence after decades? By being a self-repped artist participating at juried art fairs around the US. That means managing innumerable little details to sell directly to collectors instead of depending on gallery representation and public exhibitions.
And then also somehow finding the time to focus on art, too.
I averaged fourteen shows a year from 2002-2018 with several projects including primitivist pastel landscapes, and digital fantasy assemblages.
I also have been the business manager for my and my spouse’s art since 2000, and was his part-time studio support from 2018-2023.
My own art career was on hold from 2018 to 2023 with something like family leave. My new work breaks from all my previous whimsical subject matter by exploring and compounding linear abstract themes, refining them until I make beauty and order out of all the chaos.