Bio/Artist Statement

Seattle based fine artist, maëry lanahan, has been honing her skills as an abstract oil painter for the past several years. Exploring a complex inner landscape, her work offers an insight into the artist's quest for identity. She uses non representational color and form to illustrate emotions, archetypes, psychological exchanges. 

For lanahan, painting is like looking into a windowpane and seeing the reflection of her self, the context in which she lives, and the fusion of these two. Using the canvas as a sounding board, she explores the human condition by extracting basic color and form from recurring memories. 

Many of her works oscillate between two and three dimensional, and figuration and abstraction, an attempt to create a reality which is parallel to but separate from the real world. 

lanahan explains, ‘Because I choose when to show gravity, perspective, color and light, I am able to emote through them. I glaze thin layers of oil paint to create rich and luminescent shapes that interrelate based on the concept at hand. In some ways it is like the cloud watching we do as children. We tend to see in the clouds what is already within us. In this way, my art is about discovery.’