Artist

Laurel Antur is based in the mountains of Southern California. Currently working in cold wax and oil, Laurel has used many different media like watercolor, inks, and mixed media. Inspired by expressive and intermodal arts, Laurel uses art as a mystical practice to access the collective unconscious. Fighting the emotional challenges of our times, she uses art to connect with nature and envisions new myths for a possibly post-human world.

laurelantur.com

Larisa Pilinsky, the Russian-born, Los Angeles-based artist and writer, began her visual art activities as a collagist. Actually, she began her professional involvement with art as a journalist advocating for other artists, specifically the ArmenianRussian Bunker group; but as her connection deepened to the adventurous and open-spirited Bunker artists, she found herself moved to make art herself, with their encouragement. Lark’s painting clearly derives from Bunker aesthetics in its reliance on texture, gesture, and flow. Her color sensibility, however, comes from somewhere entirely different, from artistic impulses that emerged a century and a half (or more) earlier. Focused on representational, usually landscape. subjects – albeit ones that often disappear into a painterly scumble (only to reappear on second or third glance) – Lark describes those subjects with sweeping, almost sculpted brushstrokes and clots of paint, as well as a glowing palette that descends from the French Impressionists, luminous and mysterious atmospherics reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner, and a granular embrace of nature – a comprehension of space itself as part of the natural order – that brings to mind Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters.

(By Peter Frank) - Llarkgallery.com

Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated with the liminal —- the neither here nor there, the betwixt or the in-between. The ancient Celts called this state Caol-ait or “thin places” where the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds merge.

When I paint, I penetrate a threshold that allows me to enter this realm of consciousness, where one can explore the interflow between soul and matter, and between time and eternity. It is a realm of pure possibility.

My art is a recorded event of my deep interest in mysticism and the natural world, as well as a passageway into my own mythical inversion of reality. I see my paintings as portals; visual archives that tap into my unconscious. My surfaces are painted over layers of symbols and forms, recalling cave walls and ritual chambers. Many of my paintings are inspired by my study of ancient cultures and travel to sacred sites around the globe where animistic worldviews encompassed a belief in a magical Other World.

I believe that art is intrinsic to the nurturance of the human spirit and that artists’ true essence is transformative. In all my work I seek to honor that state of the soul when the artist experiences the ultimate liberation, which is the personal act of creation itself.

www.HarmoniaInstitute.com