Carnegie Visual Arts Center

Echoes of Existence by Lawrence Mathis February 28th - April 4th

Artist Lawrence Mathis lives and works on 45 acres near Chickamauga, georgia, about 20 miles from his boyhood home. Lawrence has drawn and painted since childhood showing talent and special interest in art and architecture from an early age. He is self-taught in both areas. He attended Berry College in Rome, Georgia, graduating with a degree in philosophy and a minor in art history. After college, Lawrence spent ten years working as an architectural designer in Chattanooga and Atlanta. He left the architectural field to pursue fine art full-time in 1992 although he still enjoys designing a house now and then!

THE ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Nature is an endless source. I pray there, walk there, am taught and rejuvenated there. I am fed by my intuitions of nature. this happens in peaceful, unpopulated landscapes where intuition and instinct bear the lightest yoke. Far from the city, where these forces are given freedom to impress the mind, doors open to many social and spiritual possibilities.

I travel in the mind’s eye, away from particulars, the deluge of minutia that convention uses to fragment reality into information. I move toward simplicity, universality; toward elemental qualities of experiencing and making art. I leave behind questions of objective or non-objective art trusting the all-inclusiveness of the myth and metaphor of nature.

I love Georgia, my native state, and in that sense I continue in the romance of the American Landscape tradition. ANy aspect of nature is endless when viewed with passion, and it is to me as if my little state is as large as the “unexplored west.” I have been greatly inspired by Mark Rothko and George Inness, and greatly influenced by the composer Arvo Part. I generally work from memory.

My oil paintings usually begin as non-representational pieces. I work to satisfy the compositional needs of the piece. Inevitably a landscape from my memory suggests itself, but having been “discovered” by working from inside, it appears in mythic terms. Typically a painting will result from several sessions of applying glazes and at certain junctures, impastos, worked up from non-representational underpaintings.

- Lawrence Mathis