Photograph by George Sakkestad
Artist Karen Laudon's early work "Patience of Job" is at Villa Montalvo as part of the "Waterbones" exhibit.
By Shari Kaplan
During her professional artistic career, still less than a decade old, Menlo Park artist Karen Laudon says her images have evolved from the figure to the internal to the abstract. All aspects of this triad come to play in Waterbones, the new exhibit in The Gallery at Villa Montalvo, Saratoga.
The exhibit spans samples of Laudon's art from 1992 through 1996, the majority being recent. She first began incorporating bodily influences into her art in the early 1990s, after she completed a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and entered the master's degree program at the same school.
During this time, some members of her family were dealing with serious illnesses; Laudon's art helped her come to terms with this. Among the pieces at Montalvo from this series, which depicts bodily organs and bones in a naturalistic way with toned-down colors, are "Patience of Job," "Murmur," "Flux" and "Internal Fossil."
"Color seems to be an emotional thing with me. I find myself attracted to certain color relationships. I've noticed that my colors became subdued and darker," she says regarding the paintings in this early, somber series.
"I love color; I can't get enough of it. It's just so powerful, and oil paint has the ability to be so luminous and the colors so strong. Color has an ability to create certain emotional qualities," she adds.
In more recent years, Laudon's colors became more vibrant, reflecting her changing outlook as well as her move to the abstract. Part of this move came from studying cadavers as models, which she says made her confront mortality in "a pretty inspiring way." It also showed her that naturalistic portrayals of the body itself could be limiting and that she felt a need for more abstract, transformative, organic elements.
Many paintings at Montalvo, including a handful from Laudon's "Internal Garden" series, exhibit an almost surreal blend of body and landscape imagery in which the boundaries blur between human, animal, plant and nature.
Some paintings definitely lean more toward the external environment, such as "Moon Cradle," a large canvas painted in a luminous predominance of purple, blue, teal and green. It may be a view of the moon from within a tidepool; alternately, it resembles a vista of mountains and valleys illumined by the glowing lunar body.
Other paintings, such as "Bloom Cycle" No. 1-4 and "Internal Garden" No. 3 and No. 4, could be shimmeringly beautiful under-the-sea views or perspectives from within the mysterious, unexplored inner space of the body. Tiny items resembling flowers, bones, sperm and fish and gracefully convoluted tissues can be found in these and other paintings--or are these simply abstract images meant to resemble their more tangible counterparts?
Laudon says she is sometimes unsure herself, but that just adds to the enigmatic appeal.
"There are so many intriguing similarities between the natural landscape and the human body. Certain forms appear in nature and in the body. It's largely the viewer's perception that determines what the painting is," she says.
"I don't necessarily paint to send a message: 'This is what this is about.' If it speaks to [the viewer] at all, even if it's in an inexplicable way, that's something I'm pretty happy about."
"Waterbones" runs through Feb. 16. The Gallery, located at 15400 Montalvo Rd., is open Thu. and Fri., 1-4 p.m., Sat. and Sun., 11 a.m.- 4 p.m., before Montalvo concerts and during intermissions. Laudon will be present Feb. 2 at 2 p.m. during an informal talk by Irene Pijoan, a painter and San Francisco Art Institute instructor. For more information, call 741-3421, ext. 331.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 15, 1997.
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