Louisa McElwain

Louisa McElwain adores summer storms, especially the way the light changes and the clouds dance across the horizon ahead of the rain. Living in the country, 20 miles outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Louisa is in tune with the changing weather. If it looks like “one of those days,” she is quick to pack up her pick-up truck and head out to find that “power spot” for what she likes to call “a dialogue with nature.” Once there, she moves quickly, stapling a large canvas to a makeshift armature mounted on the back of the pick-up. The tailgate provides a table for all of her paint – large globs squeezed instrict order from dozens of tubes. With palette knives and masonry trowels of all sizes, including some attached with duck tape to long sticks, she goes to work.

Although she is painting the New Mexico landscape, Louisa is really looking for a balance between her experience with the environment and the physical reality of paint on canvas. She believes “the marks, strokes and gestures of paint express forces of nature, both internal and external.” Jackson Pollock once famously said, “I am nature.” That resonates with Louisa who believes that this idea of working from the inside out while honoring the rhythms of nature, is the most important contribution offered by 20th century American painters in the Abstract Expressionist Movement. The approach freed many artists who rejected the rigid plein-air approach. “My painterly heritage is the New York School,” says Louisa. “I am an abstract painter who paints outside.” And for Louisa, the act of creating is a workout – she calls it “extreme painting.” “I often feel energy, like electricity, surging upward from the ground, through my knees, through my arms and right on to the canvas.”

Looking at a Louisa McElwain painting today, the importance of color is clear. Bold strokes of thick paint cut across the canvas forming a collage of colorful shapes that meld together into an abstracted landscape. Louisa isn’t interested in realism. “I like painting with sticks (palette knives) because it disengages my ego – that part of me that wants to be about describing things. I do like to draw and I do like to be right, but when I’m making a painting I want it to be as much about the paint as the motif. The palette knife doesn’t allow me to articulate things in a drawing way, but it does have an additional dimension of expressing the sensuous quality of paint. It expresses more of the physicality of the material than I’m likely to achieve with a brush.” But what comes so naturally now, wasn’t always inherent. Louisa learned about color from some of the best teachers of the time.

After her studies in Europe with a master portrait artist, Louisa attended a summer session at the Skowhegan School in Maine. She spent an eye-opening three months working with the likes of Alex Katz and famed landscape painter Neil Welliver. “It was paradise for painters and sculptors. We had little cottages on the lake, and up on the hill old dairy barns had been turned into great studio space. For those of us who wanted to go out and paint landscapes, the kitchen would make a bag lunch and we’d jump in the back of a pick-up truck. Maine is so broad-shouldered and open – great things to see and paint. It was a wonderful experience.” Skowhegan was life changing for McElwain. She left Maine committed to landscape painting. “Alex Katz once told me, ‘You have to find your way to say the grass,’ which I took as a mandate. A sacred duty of every artist to originality.” And she has never wavered from that commitment. Another crucial part of Louisa’s artistic education came from Joseph Albers by way of Welliver, at the University of Pennsylvania, where Louisa finished up her undergraduate degree. Albers, the famed color theorist, championed the idea that color is always seen in relation to the colors around it. At Penn, where he was a professor, Welliver applied those color principles to his own work, and Louisa was paying attention. “Albers was almost scientific in his approach to color,” she says. “He reduced color in nature to some very dynamic and simplified relationships of flat pieces of color – each piece of paint has its own identity. It’s almost like the pre-digital pixalization of color. Instead of having a tonal structure, a painting is built on the relationship of colors. I came to understand how light is created through the relationship of color.”

“I have lived and painted in New Mexico since 1985, working outdoors under a wide variety of conditions, open to the impulse of changing light, wind, heat, cold, insects, forces of Nature which bring life into my paintings. For me, painting is a dance to the tempo of the evolving day. Usually, I paint off the back of a pick-up truck, which gives me access to many wonderful places, and provides a way to stabilize and transport large canvases. Here in the West it seems that the canvas is never big enough. To include my entire field of vision at arm's length, 60x90 ins. is about right. I paint with knives and masonry trowels, which allows me to work fast. Each painting is completed in less than 4 hours, regardless of size, as permitted by weather and light. Painting large canvases outdoors invites another interaction with Nature as, inevitably, insects, particles of plants and soil end up on the painting. I see these as valuable contributions to the work. Sometimes I put little stones, bones or pieces of glass and plants into the paint, in the same spirit as the Navajo weaver who incorporates things into her blanket to bless those who will receive it, and as a way of acknowledging the temporality of things. My process is an inquiry into sensuous potential of paint. To explore the mystery of sensation, to touch that which is known but cannot be measured, understood yet indescribable; the act of painting is an expression of my connectedness with God and Nature. I am Nature.” Louisa McElwain

Artworks Magazine, 2009