I didn’t grow up around art or artists. I've always learned things quickly and felt like a smart person, but painting is not an intellectual pursuit for me. I try to make paintings that are sensitive and interesting and of some emotional value to those who look at them. I love beauty, but I love it best when it’s interlaced with not-beauty, the vernacular of the world.
If it works, I can draw a viewer into looking at a painting very carefully, noticing the gesture of a brushstroke or a shape, how the paint’s edges change, how the surface of the oil paint is matte or slightly less matte or shiny, how the colors shift as the paint is thicker or thinner. I hope the viewer is able to be lost in looking, seeing one thing after another even in this simple object. Over time, I have become more and more willing to be loose—to do things that are goofy or look unfinished or like a mistake. I'm always discovering something, and I want that discovery to be very alive in the finished painting.
I work relatively small because I want the painting to be an object that is comfortably fitted there beside you, with you, not looming over you or engulfing you. Like a companion that you can discover more and more about over time, one that lives among all the other medium-sized things in life.
Painting is my attempt to join in the human effort throughout time to talk with others about what being alive is like. It’s well suited for this, I think, because, like being alive, it’s simultaneously so dumbly physical and yet insistently metaphorical. We can’t help but look for patterns and meanings, even as we’re never sure if something that we think we see means nothing or everything.
Laura Bidwa is based in Columbus, Ohio and received her BFA in Painting in 1990 from Indiana University and her MFA in Painting and Drawing in 1996 from The Ohio State University. She has participated in several national and international residencies including at the Vermont Studio Center and in Dresden, Germany through the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Bidwa has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and Europe in both commercial and nonprofit galleries as well as art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Her work is included in over 100 private, public, and corporate art collections.