Natural Order
A Show by Lara Neece of Forest & Fin
Sadly, I missed the opening reception last Friday, but luckily, Lara's paintings will be hanging at the Real Estate Studio - 214 King Street - until February 26th. The show features small, medium, and large mixed-media paintings on wood inspired by the natural eco-systems of the coastal Southeast.
"My artwork is a collection of imagery drawn from eco-systems that I come in contact with daily or during my travels. The imagery is combined into designs examining the complexity and diversity of surrounding eco-systems. I draw, print, and paint nature-inspired, line-driven imagery onto wood, paper, and fabric. My wood panel paintings are printed; hand-painted with inks and dyes; and then finished to draw out the natural grain of the wood. Each piece is a contained environment or portion of an ecosystem that comments on such themes as natural order, inter-dependence, balance, evolution, and environmental issues.
Living on a sailboat for three years granted me the opportunity to take a closer look at the wind, tide, weather, and my impact on the plants and animals that share these environments. While traveling up and down the southeastern coast of the United States, I saw countless eco-systems operating and interacting with the same set of larger elements in both similar and drastically different ways. From oysters relying on the tide to filter water systems in the Chesapeake Bay, to osprey in the Lowcountry of South Carolina using wind currents to travel between small and large bodies of water while hunting fish. In North Carolina, I saw a black bear on the banks of a canal in the early morning hours, and on a sail from the Exumas to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, a sea turtle as big as a Volkswagon. These experiences have illuminated the fine line between life and death, a balanced system and an unbalanced one, and how small changes in these environmental elements can have big effects. Natural order is a synthesis of these experiences." - Lara Neece
Living on a sailboat for three years granted me the opportunity to take a closer look at the wind, tide, weather, and my impact on the plants and animals that share these environments. While traveling up and down the southeastern coast of the United States, I saw countless eco-systems operating and interacting with the same set of larger elements in both similar and drastically different ways. From oysters relying on the tide to filter water systems in the Chesapeake Bay, to osprey in the Lowcountry of South Carolina using wind currents to travel between small and large bodies of water while hunting fish. In North Carolina, I saw a black bear on the banks of a canal in the early morning hours, and on a sail from the Exumas to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, a sea turtle as big as a Volkswagon. These experiences have illuminated the fine line between life and death, a balanced system and an unbalanced one, and how small changes in these environmental elements can have big effects. Natural order is a synthesis of these experiences." - Lara Neece
