About the Artist
About:
Lowe is an emerging artist, painting and curating forgotten lives in San Francisco. Her passion for genealogy and her desire to reawaken the past is what drives her to paint colorful portraits of subjects that are over a century old. She received her BA in Studio Art from Marist College in 2010.
Artist's Statement:
Oil Paintings
From a stack of gray and abandoned, antiques photographs, I choose a handful to bring into the contemporary conversation. In researching dozens of Victorian lives, I am inspired by the unchanging human dynamics and a desire to preserve the forgotten.
As an artist, I feel my role is not to be the storyteller of these distant lives, but the facilitator of a connection between the viewer and the past. In ruminating about the daily lives of these subjects, we can explore our own assumptions or desires. A two-way mirror is created of us watching them and them watching us, and a dissection of those thoughts often offers some surprises.
Two visual themes that run through my oil paintings are color and lace. Working with oils, I utilize life-like hues in place of the stiff, colorless faces in the photographs that I work from. Blushing cheeks somehow have the ability to shrink the perceived distance of time between viewer and subject. The reason for cloaking my subjects in vintage lace is in order to create a barrier obscuring their untold stories. As much as I desire to pull them into the present, there is so much hidden by time. The gaps in the fabric and florals weaving through, give a presence to the underlying story which I invite the viewer to explore for themselves.
Contact the Artist:
EMAIL: sierralowe1@gmail.com | Email the artist for commission and purchase inquiries or exhibition opportunities.