Laura Bidwa
Biography
Laura Bidwa (b.1968, Long Beach, CA) is a painter whose abstract works explore fleeting moments in time, place, memory, and nature. They combine a delicate balance of translucent layers that are dense yet airy, minimal yet expressively loose. Bidwa received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1990 from Indiana University. She later attended The Ohio State University and received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in 1996. She has been awarded the opportunity to participate in several national and international residencies from organizations such as the Vermont Studio Center and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Bidwa has exhibited extensively across the U.S. and Europe. Her work has been acquired by over fifty private, public, and corporate art collections.
Haystack Perspective
Laura Bidwa has a fascination with landscape that springs from her love of trees. The networks they create, the singularity of one tree, and the enormity of the organism all inspire her work. When she was making landscapes primarily, the artist drew no hard line between abstraction and realism. Bidwa has described her work as “jumping into abstraction.” This way of talking about painting, as though it evolves while the artist watches from above, speaks to her observational practice. In Bidwa’s words, “I use color, touch, and physicality to talk about what it feels like to look at things and love them, but not know what they are.” Bidwa expresses liminal flashes with thoughtfully applied painterly strokes. Many of her paintings begin with a panel painted black and sanded to reveal crosshatches of the surface beneath. This geometric background, tempered by a well-worn feeling, offer a gentle contrast to the more organic painterly objects in the foreground. The layering of the complicated sanded surface with gestural paint strokes arouses more questions than answers; the paintings seem to whisper their secrets, as ruffling leaves might whisper to the wind.