Stephanie Law, “Awaken”
Opening Reception: April 6th, 2019, 6-8 pm.
April 6th, 2019 – May 5th, 2019
ARTIST STATEMENT
Awaken began in the literal sense of the word, in images and words scrawled during jaunts of insomnia. They feature improbable combinations of fantastical landscapes where sea, sky, and forests are inverted. These disparate realms intermingle in textured shifts of watercolor and gold leaf; and they meld, only to be shattered into mosaic components.
Mosaic patterns are a repeating motif. They scatter through the dream-landscapes, shed from disintegrating dragonfly wings. They uncoil from the moon, and weave between branches. They create a visual, symbolic shorthand for the intricacies of the world’s biological patterns and building blocks.
Awaken celebrates the beauty of these inner workings, but also revels in the freedom that embracing the figurative night brings. In the nocturnal realms, the logic of daytime slumbers. Desires, defiance of rules and normality, and acceptance of change become the dominant realities. It is about that sense of lightness that comes with casting off fear off judgement and allowing impulse to dictate creative urges.
This comes to life in the wildly dancing figures, the symbols of change and transformation that the dragonflies encapsulate, the capering trickster foxes that shift between the worlds of life, death, and dream, and elusive castles that hover like mirages above tangled forest canopies.
ABOUT STEPHANIE LAW
Stephanie Law’s work is an exploration of mythology mixed with her personal symbolism. Her art journeys through surreal otherworlds, populated by dreamlike figures, masked creatures, and winged shadows. The fantastical permeates through the visions with a promise that this is a world that underlies reality, when viewed with a desire for beauty and a shifted perception.
Archetypes, the basis for the universal appeal of mythological concepts, are one of the defining inspirations for her imagery. This is mingled with the movement of dance. Stephanie has been a dancer for almost two decades, and she uses that experience of how the human body moves and emotes to create a bridge into her artwork so that not only do the humans dance across the page, but the branches of her trees move with a sinuous grace, and the arrangement of inanimate elements has a choreographed rhythm and flow.
Growing up in California, Stephanie has been surrounded by the wealth of natural inspiration all around her. The twisting boughs of live oaks from the hills near her home insinuate themselves into her paintings. The chaos of Nature’s wild growth, and conversely the beauty of decay, echo in the textures and fractal patterns of her work.
She currently showcases her personal work in group and solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, San Francisco, Nashville, and San Diego, while continuing to publish book collections of her art via Shadowscapes Press. The most recent volume is Descants and Cadences. Her work has also been included in the Spectrum annual of fantastic art in for several years, and at the Spectrum showcase in September 2014 at the Society of Illustrators in NY. Her botanical art has been showcased in internationally juried exhibitions at botanical gardens and arboretums. Recent work features insects, imaginative plants, and fae creatures, interwoven into a miniature world that is often overlooked, when size and physical permanence is equated with importance.
