Groveland Gallery is pleased to present Painting Without Words, an exhibition of new work by Minneapolis artist, Lauren Stringer, opening December 6. A longtime Groveland artist, Stringer is a painter with a broad-ranging career in the arts. She returns with a new series of gouache and watercolor paintings, pivoting from her work in narrative illustration to present a looser, more lyrical visual language. Rendered in vibrant hues, these colorful, expressive paintings draw on her deep experience as an illustrator while carving out space for abstraction and spontaneity. The pieces invite viewers into moments of stillness, wonder, and the pull of the unknown.

 

Stringer was born in Great Falls, Montana. She received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program in New York. Stringer exhibits her art in museums and galleries, writes and illustrates children’s picture books, designs sets and costumes for circus, theater, dance and performance art, and presents workshops in schools and conferences internationally and locally. She received the McKnight Fellowship for Sculpture in 1992, and again for Children’s Literature in 2012, for her story, When Stravinsky Met Nijinsky, Two Artists, Their Ballet, and One Extraordinary Riot, and again in 2020 for her story, An Abundance of Light, the Story of Matisse in Morocco. She was an artist-in-residence at the Edward Albee Foundation, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic, and a writer-in-residence at Milkwood Retreat. Lauren Stringer creates her paintings, sculptures, and stories in a pink Victorian house in Minneapolis, where she has lived for the past 37 years with her husband, Matthew Smith.

 

Of this upcoming exhibition of work, Stringer writes:

 

“After moving often to different houses and apartments in different cities for much of my early life, I have lived in my current house and studio in Minneapolis for 37 years and grown familiar with the changing light, day through night and season by season. Since much of my studio time is spent writing and illustrating picture books, I take time to escape the narratives and paint the view from my back porch. There is an opening at the back of my yard that sometimes glows invitingly through the thick foliage, especially at dawn and dusk. Like an opening through a looking glass or a doorway to a secret garden, I am drawn to it and what lies beyond.

 

In-between books, I often travel to landscapes that feel familiar to me, perhaps because they are where my ancestors came from. The rugged coastal paths of Cornwall and the rounded mountains of the Lake District in the UK are both places that have lured me along paths and through openings to the unknown beyond, similar to my own backyard. There is a certain wildness that overtakes these landscapes and my gardens at home that captivates my imagination and insists I make paintings to try to capture it.

 

Using gouache and watercolor, I allow the image to be affected by the sounds and movements around me, and to express the time of day, the season, the weather and any emotions that well up. Each painting demands learning a new language of line, shape, and texture. These small paintings are abstracted expressions of being present to my known world and drawn along paths unfamiliar.”

 

The artist will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, December 6 from 2-5 pm.