Under Milk Wood
November 2019
Averill Park, NY, United States
Simultaneously modal and illustrative, Under Milk Wood – named for the Dylan Thomas radio drama which inspired much of the work – manages to eschew its ostensibly concrete underpinnings in contemporary representational art. Neither topical nor retrograde, the twelve richly-colored oil paintings on display defer instead to what the artist calls a “domain of feeling.” While her narratively-charged landscapes, figures and portraits certainly engage with such semantic notions as adolescence and sites of memory, in Lorenze’s use of thick, impasto strokes and glowing hues one can sense that the well goes much deeper than can be described in such prosaic terms.
Whitney Lorenze_Born in 1996, Whitney Lorenze is a Bridgeport-based painter, printmaker, and draftswoman who received her BFA in Drawing from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2019. Graduating cum laude and with distinction in her major, Lorenze was the recipient of two merit-based scholarships for her four years at the Academy. Through her work with Shoreline Arts Alliance, she has served as both juror and curator for the organization’s Exhibition and Scholarship competition Future Choices for the past two years and was twice a juror on the Visual Arts panel for their annual Top Talent Scholarship competition. Lorenze has exhibited in venues including the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT and Hygienic Gallery in New London, CT, and her BFA Thesis Exhibition was mounted in April 2019. Her two-person exhibition of works on paper, Holding Tongues, will be on view at the Marquee Gallery in New London until October 11th.
