Available work

LOUISA MCELWAIN 1953 - 2013

Louisa was always looking for a balance between her experience with the environment and the physical reality of paint on canvas. She believed “the marks, strokes and gestures of paint express forces of nature, both internal and external.” Jackson Pollock once famously said, “I am nature.”   That resonated with Louisa who believed that this idea of working from the inside out while honoring the rhythms of nature, was 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 was a workout — she called 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 wasn’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 came so naturally in later years, wasn’t always inherent. Louisa learned about color from some of the best teachers of the time.