Lani Rowe
El Prado, NM
If it is to hurt you, let it hurt you deeply.
Oil
30” x 30” x .75”
2017
Not For Sale
About
Lani started an award winning cabaret in San Francisco in her 20s (Rococo Risque). She composed music for modern dance (MGM) during that time. Later living in Berlin, she started painting with oil when her digital mixer and recording equipment were stolen on her initial journey there. Drawn to the flatness and geometry of Orthodox icons in her 30s, Lani translated this style into a series of colorful and flat Buddhas. After graduating, she began to lean into developing the technique of subconscious expressionism.
Artist Statement
All mediums hold great interest - but painting is a particular love. Like dancing in a 2D world, painting enables me to materialize inner movement as visual stimuli. I paint to be evocative of the hidden world of emotion in myself and the viewer. Emotion is not simply a feeling. It is an entire internal world of sensation, memory, landscape and the subconscious. I call my work subconscious expressionism because an accurate expression of my “image of reality” is more hidden than “feelings or ideas” - more akin to the hidden meaning of dreams deep in the recesses of the forgotten and inaccessible. This is the place of the Red Book and Jung’s reflections on the mandala. My work is done very deliberately: I play a YouTube recording of a spiritual teacher or song and take a particularly meaningful sentence and make it into a mantra that I repeat ad nauseam while painting. I always choose a color palette and what brushes I will use - prior to any paint on the canvas. The technique is simple. Each brush stroke informs the next. Here can emotion’s dance reveals itself to the painter and the viewer alike.
