Interior with Paint Chips, Abstract Expressionist Painting, 2016

Interior with Paint Chips (Abstract Expressionism painting) Oil and acrylic on canvas. Unframed. 'Interior with Paint Chips' explores the idea of an interior as a container. Under an arch punctuated by doors and windows and furnished with luminous blocks of color, an array of approaches to painting is consolidated - from translucent pours to hard-edged rectangles, scraped viscous oil paint and dry-brushed ink. Laura Newman is an American abstract artist. She creates vivid, dynamic paintings that revel in a harmonious balance between gestural brushwork, hard-edge geometric spatial arrangements and layered, architectural compositions. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Newman currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Newman paints in a light-filled studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her practice includes large-scale canvases created primarily with oils and acrylics and smaller works on paper created with ink, watercolors and other mediums. Her techniques include staining, pouring, and a combination of gestural and meticulous mark making. About her process, Newman has said, “My paintings often take specific qualities of particular places as points of departure, but I try to approach the image without preconceived ideas and to discover forms through improvisation.” Her finished paintings combine geometric delineations of space, ephemeral color fields, dynamic lines and organic forms, resulting in atmospheric images evocative of representational landscapes, but always opening up to something more, something beyond. Newman's paintings may look like they are quickly made because she values a sense of freshness; But in reality they take a long time to complete. The artist starts by setting down rudiments of a visual idea, reworks the painting over and over until she achieves an image that she recognizes but that at the same time surprises her. Newman often finds inspiration in the view out her studio window, which looks out at a large swath of sky over the city. The vastness of the open air juxtaposes with the intermingling of construction and deconstruction occupying the urban landscape. Her work often explores that interplay between the confinement of built environments and the freedom of open spaces. Elements of window frames sometimes inhabit her paintings, creating a sense of distance between spatial planes. Newman is interested in the interplay between representation and abstraction. She strives for a language of forms, lines, colors and spatial relationships that can be read both formally and abstractly or interpreted more broadly as fictional, illusionary environments. Laura Newman has exhibited in multiple solo exhibitions in New York as well as in group exhibitions in galleries and museums along the US East Coast and in Canada. Her work has been written about extensively, including in Artforum, The New York Times, and the Brooklyn Rail. Works by Laura Newman are in the permanent collections of multiple institutions, including those of Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM Corporation, Prudential Insurance Company and the University of Arizona.