“Vacation Trilogy, Part I,” Lori Lovely and Kelly Pringle
“Vacation Trilogy, Part II,” Lori Lovely and Kelly Pringle
“Vacation Trilogy, Part III,” Lori Lovely and Kelly Pringle
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“Untitled,” Lori Lovely
“I love to let my imagination discover a beautiful place. I can use a little paint and a canvas and go to the most peaceful and free place possible. Waterfalls and ocean scenes are my favorite thing to paint because it is alive. I feel like I can walk right into the picture and breathe in and smell all the flowers and trees, feel the moisture of the crisp water and even find a rabbit hiding in a log. it is a walk I can share with anyone who wants to discover this place.
Thank you for letting me do this. It lets me be somewhere beautiful for a while.”
– Lori Lovely
Dear Lori Lovely:
My friends at JAC and I were discussing your painting and wanted to share those reflections. While classic American landscapes showed glorious vistas enticing settlers to move in, Lovely’s is a welcome departure. One only has to think of Alfred Bierstadt (1830-1902), whose luminous Western skies were a testament to Manifest Destiny, the right — even the obligation — of settlers to take over, with native populations miraculously out of sight — and mind.
Lovely offered us something else, and we were quite moved by it. This landscape is a sanctuary, one of those places one comes across in life that feels like a direct connection to the energy in the universe, within oneself and without. In that sense, we recognized it as a true gift from the artist to the viewer.
And how did that sublime energy manifest itself? We sensed it in the union between the voluptuous rendering of the trees and the waterfall’s straight-down, relentless power. In the Asian tradition, this union would be expressed as yin and yang, feminine and masculine energies. More in the Western Impressionist tradition, we found joy in the rhythm of tree trunks, the light playing through the leaves, the richness of the greenery, and the aqua pools at the base of the waterfall.
The painting, as we said, invited us to discover a safe and spiritual place. We were drawn there as though we had been traveling on a long, straight, boring highway, pulled over, found a path, and followed that path through dense brush, and then — voila — there we were at last at this revelation. As Lovely pointed out on JAC’s site, it was a “walk I can share with anyone who wants to discover this place.” Unlike landscape masterpieces of the 19th century, this work is about sharing, not owning.
And there’s a lot to share. As Sacha noted, one of the exercises that impressed her in art school was to take a piece of cardboard, cut a square into it, and then hold it up to various parts of artwork to see how they held up. ‘This one has some very special vignettes,” she said. The foreground grass and moss set the scene for a nap or picnic, the pool for dipping and splashing, and the background perspective for standing tall over the entire scene, absorbing the stress-relieving negative ions waterfalls produce.
Thank you for “sharing this walk” with us, Lori Lovely. It was a special place that would stay with us for some time.
Best Regards,
Snow, Sacha, and Louis