Verdure: lush, green, thriving

My work explores the emotional and psychological attachments created by daily interactions with the landscape. The paintings are tangible collections of moments of stillness among movement. Careful observations and personal narratives emerge through calligraphic marks made with the sense of immediacy and poignance of diary-like entries. Meditations on window views, trees blurred by rain, the burst of blooms, the hush of winter, murmurings of green populate the canvases.  The work explores falling into rhythms of nature and noticing that, in the exchange between person and place, there is the development of a deep urgency to capture, understand, hold on, and let evolve. 

In Verdure, imagery slips and sinks. Color and form fragment across the painted surfaces, punctuating in moments of clarity.  Collages are formed from paintings fractured and torn from their original context and densely layered to create new environments. Through a combination of disparate fragmented landscapes, these works examine what remains after change, how this affects the evolution of memories of place, and the potential for new growth.

About the Artist

Laurén Gerig is a visual artist living in Lansing, Michigan. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Painting and Writing from Indiana Wesleyan University and earned her MFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University. Her work has been included in several solo, small group, and national juried exhibitions, including solo shows at the Schmidt Art Center at Southwestern Illinois College, the Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University, The Nelson Gallery Lansing, and Arkansas State University. Laurén has been interviewed and featured in Create!Magazine, CandyFloss Magazine as well as numerous online art blogs. Beyond creating, Laurén has organized and co-curated exhibitions at Scene Metrospace and Lowell Arts Center and has written articles for The Arts To Hearts Project. Laurén is the Director of Galleries and Outreach and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University.