Louisa McElwain online catalogue 2017

LOUISA MCELWAIN 1953 - 2013

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ouisa McElwain’s paintings tell her story in vivid swaths of color and light that dance unyielding across the canvas. Not merely a catalogue of her career and life, they chronicle the artist’s journey into the heart of the Southwestern landscape. They recount her transcendent experience with subject and medium, even as they become a narrative about energy, its genesis, and eventual manifestation on canvas. An innate desire to channel nature’s magnificence lay at the center of McElwain’s work. Through thick, heady strokes of luminous pigments, she managed to build a connection among physical, spiritual, and external forces in two dimensions. To achieve this, she harnessed the paint’s ability to capture and suspend energy—a gift made visible in the rich hues, intricate light play, and variety of textures that fill every piece. McElwain’s abstracted landscapes, painted en plein air, peel back the curtain of romantic conformity to expose the pulsating core of her subject matter. A coalescence of representative and abstract styles, the paintings give equal validity to theme and material. The imagery has been distilled down, filtered through the artist’s lens, and infused with palpable dynamism. Ultimately, the objects are represented by their most fundamental elements: light, color, line, and shape. Open compositions evoke a vastness within each scene, while also fostering intimacy among the fluid, inviting brush strokes. Whether a mountainous panorama or a dense grove of trees, every space is full of life that seems to burst forth from the picture plane. The land beckons us into its space to share in an exchange of beauty, light, and energy. Not simply representations of some far off place, McElwain’s paintings are

localized, self-sustaining entities—physically present, tactile, and accessible. Never content to record a singular point in time, McElwain painted the mountains, trees, arroyos, and rivers of the Southwest as they transformed across the hours, changing color and demeanor with the earth’s steady rotation. She described her work as “a dance to the tempo of the evolving day,” and in that vein, the deliberate yet expressive ribbons of paint possess a subtle kineticism as they populate each canvas, ascending and falling, protruding and regressing, flourishing and receding. Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1953, McElwain grew up with a deep appreciation of nature. She pursued fine art from the beginning, and sought out a formal education at several East Coast colleges and through private instruction in Italy before settling into her creative niche during a summer session at the Skowhegan School in Maine. There, she found the freedom to embrace the landscape in her own way, channeling her love of naturalistic scene painting together with a keen interest in the materiality and process of creating a piece of art. Working under renowned modern realist Alex Katz, McElwain learned the importance of finding her true artistic voice, of speaking from the truest part of herself to communicate her creative vision. Following her stint at Skowhegan, McElwain enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and studied with noted landscape painter Neil Welliver before earning her BFA. McElwain cemented her place in the contemporary Southwest canon when she moved to New Mexico in 1985, answering the call to engage new surroundings. She spent the next twenty-eight years painting a robust, ever-changing landscape that enchanted and challenged her on a daily basis. More than a window onto the world, McElwain’s paintings endure as a window into the artist’s mind and soul. Emblems of the sanctity generated from artistic expression found deep within oneself, they carry her legacy of passion, energy, and an abiding love for the land—forever preserved in the paint she heralded as a conduit for the sublime.

Selected Collections

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American Embassy, Bogota, Columbia American Embassy, Manama, Bahrain American Embassy, Sanaa, Yemen American Embassy, Singapore AT&T, Fresno, CA Coors Brewing Co, Golden, CO INA Corp. Harrisburg, PA NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium Nokia, Irving, TX Peat Marwick, San Francisco, CA Pepsi-Cola, Riverside, CA Philadelphia Zoological Society, Philadelphia, PA Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ Rosewoods Vineyards, Redwood Valley, CA San Juan College, Farmington, NM St. Vincent Hospital Foundation, Santa Fe, NM The Booth Museum, Cartersville, GA Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA University of Texas Law School, Austin, TX

Cover: Magnificat, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 (detail, view entire painting on page 8)

Desert Sibyl oil on canvas, 54 x 84 4

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