Laura Bidwa
Artist Statement
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.
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.
Biography
Laura Bidwa’s work has been in numerous commercial and nonprofit gallery exhibitions, as well as art fairs in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, including Aqua Art Miami, ScopeMiami, ScopeNY, Art(212), and ArtLA. It is part of more than 100 private, corporate, and public collections in the United States and Europe.
Fellowships and grants include a Greater Columbus Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, an Ohio Arts Council Professional Development Award, and residencies in Vermont, Connecticut, Indiana, and Dresden, Germany. Bidwa was born in Long Beach, California, and has lived in Columbus, Ohio, since 1994.