Head on up to the Patterson Library’s Octagon Gallery in Westfield, where Lauralynn
White is exhibiting her paintings and sculpture from now until August 4th. Solo show “Tribute”
offers visitors a rich array of paintings and sculpture, formed of unique processes and natural
materials, along with important questions - How do we distill the world? What is important?
White’s pieces use wood, slate, and beeswax as their primary elements. Extended from
the patterns of wood grain and layers of stone, human figures dance in various states of
completeness. “I started finding these figures in wood as a child, seeing patterns in clouds and
in the grains of wood,” she says, but it wasn’t until decades into her artistic career that she
started making what she calls “conversations with wood”, pieces where she traces human forms
out of the grain in paint only slightly darker than the wood itself. “I wanted it to look like it just
happened,” she explains. One gallery-goer remarked that the pieces are “experiential, you have
to put your own energy into them.” The exhibition certainly rewards close attention, creating a
playful hide-and-seek with the works as more and more detail is revealed.
White’s three-dimensional work adds another perspective. In several pieces she pairs
with artist Tim Youse, using his abstract wooden sculpture as the base for her paintings. Some
of her slate works lie between painting and high-relief sculpture, using modeling clay to mold
figures, and a new series of driftwood-based sculpture features communities of beeswax people
dancing over weathered-wood hills.
White’s art has a definite agenda, which follows naturally from the subjects, materials,
and processes she uses. “I really want people to understand that the same matter that makes
up the world makes up us” she asserts, adding that she hopes this sense of connection and
love will lead people to act with greater environmental consciousness. Sure enough, it’s hard not
to feel more connected with the rest of life after spending time with “the human form integrated
in the landscape”, rising from it just as naturally as do the mountains and trees.
In keeping with this rhythm, White stresses the fluidity of her process. “I stare at these
things for a long, long time”, she laughs, “I’m spending weeks looking, until they really speak to
me”. Once she has an idea of the figures she will draw out of the material, White “shuts out the
rest of the world” for twelve hours at a time to paint, allowing her original vision to evolve. “You
may put down a line, and it changes the whole vision I had,” she says. Throughout the process,
she finds inspiration in the calm of the unconscious, saying “a lot of things come to me in the
shower, or in dreams”.
Still, the subject matter is entirely her own.
The artist divides her time between Chicago and the Chautauqua Institution, whose
School of Art contributed to her education. She helped run an inn at the institution for 17 years,
and two of her wood-panel works - ‘Determination’ and ‘Trust’ - were created in its basement
during the pandemic. As she describes the struggles of being a working artist, single mother,
and innkeeper during a global pandemic, White’s voice thickens with tears. ‘Determination’, she
says, was inspired by “setting an example and moving forward,” by “getting my kids into college,
getting my work into shows, paying the oil bill”. The piece’s lone figure has a regal presence that
demands attention, an emotional weight that connects the viewer to a specific and immediate
human experience. White attributes much of her work to “trauma”, both personal and global,
and shares that all her works “have something deeply personal to me in them”.
This, ultimately, fuels the works’ disarming power. The personal opens a window to the
universal, inviting viewers to see a different perspective on human existence - if they’re willing to
put in the work.
by Miles Hilton