Laurie Redden: Up, Down and Across

Laurie Redden. “Riverside Glazed Garden.” Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 x 1.5 inches.

Laurie Redden began her “Weave Series” more than 15 years ago, as a playful exploration and a break from her traditional, impressionistic artwork. Intrigued by color and shape, she began experimenting with further manipulation of the two by the overlap of like objects. The intersected “bits” evolved into new opportunity for line, shape and color combinations and abstraction. The “Weave Series” was born.

The weave painting process from initial idea to finished art is a very different cerebral experience from her traditional painting process. The interlacing of the objects becomes a highly compositional challenge, which she pushes even further by adding tension, depth and movement with her color choices. She often flips the canvas as she paints to orchestrate a multi-view orientation, thus engaging the viewer to the final choice of what they see.

Musical Instruments. The artistic beauty and myriad of geometric parts of musical instruments is a natural choice and was the subject she first explored, years ago. Her life-long passion for music fueled the fascination to compose her 2-D colorful “songs”.

Stained and Leaded Glass. A more recent weave series, focuses on piecing together the color, shapes and line of historical stained glass into a new painted vision. Many of the windows she references are located in Riverside. There may be 3 to more than 20 different windows represented in a weave painting.

Floral/Fauna. Laurie is an avid gardener and often gets her inspiration for plant compositions from her own yard or other gardens in the neighborhood. “We have no more room to add plants in our yard, so the weaves are an opportunity to create a new plant vignette, on canvas.”

Laurie Redden ( Risley) received her BFA (painting/drawing and graphic design) from Indiana University. After years of designing in New York and Chicago, and juggling her time between design and painting, she re-dedicated herself to her true passion, painting. Her paintings are in private homes across the United States. Last year, Laurie became the RAW (Riverside Arts Weekend) Spectacle Concept Chair and has been hard at work again, for this year’s “surprise”. She also gives private art/painting lessons in her studio.