Interdisciplinary artist Lauren Elyse is known for her colorful, dynamic paintings that make a powerful impact on their viewers. Based in San Diego, California, her inspiration comes mainly from the natural world. “Nature has always been a great influence in my life,” Elyse maintained once.
“I grew up surfing, found out a few years back I had a lineage in the floral industry reaching back to my great grandfather in Holland,” she continued. According to Elyse, painting is her way of melding all the things she loves, alongside her self-discovery, into one form of expression.
Indeed, nature—and more specifically flowers—is a recurring theme throughout her work. According to Elyse, through these paintings, she aims to explore our relationship to nature, how we manipulate it to suit our ideals of beauty, and how it can be representative of our emotions.
Having trained at the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts, Elyse works in a wide range of mediums that include watercolor, acrylic, charcoal, and oil, or “any means necessary of getting out what needs to be said in the way I need to say it”, she explains.
In a post on her personal blog, she adds that for her, there’s nothing more pleasurable than a flower rendered in oils in luxurious strokes: “I like to paint my flowers in one pass rather than layered with drying time in between,” Elyse further explained her creative process. She later said that “linseed oil added for that extra gloss and movement.”
According to Elyse, using bold strokes creates a more dynamic feel to the final piece. “For me, it creates a more energetic feel when swipes of paint slide through one another, catch and meld to bring out a subtle color blend, and in the wake leaves the high relief and impression of my brush’s intentional path,” she notes. “It’s definitely trickier to prevent colors from muddling in this approach, but the reward is that of a painted flower vibrating a bit more on the canvas.”
Though this process might be messier, Elyse admits she enjoys the chaotic, purposeful energy distilled into pigment, worked through to figured petal and leaf. We enjoy it as well!
