Biography
Ephemeral effects perceived in nature, brought on by a confluence of light, humidity and time of day or season are evoked in a series of landscapes that call to mind a range of remembered sensations in the viewer: a storm rips across a marsh, a humid day turns to thunder. Like the haze that surrounds distant memories of childhood’s summers, these paintings, with saturated color, speak to our inevitably emotional response to natural phenomena. Real places and actual moments serve as touchstones for these works that share a fascination with the often indefinite and mutable effects of sea, sky and marsh.
Painter Lorraine La Pointe grew up in rural Connecticut and spent summers on Cape Cod as a child. She is now a year-round resident of Wellfleet, Mass. where she lives with her husband, illustrator and painter Robert La Pointe, and their five-year old daughter Sasha. She comments on her approach to the painting: “I grew up in the Connecticut countryside. As a child I spent my time riding horses through the woods and meadows surrounding my family’s 200-year-old farmhouse. I was blessed with the good fortune to spend summers on Cape Cod, where I wandered the ocean beaches, and the dunes and forests of the National Seashore. I am captivated now, as I was then, by the fleeting effects of the atmosphere on nature. In my landscape work, I try to reveal a fragile instant of either quiet equilibrium or violent tension between earth and sky. I am inspired more by the emotion that the landscape evokes than by the specifics of the site. My compositions are usually simple, with an emphasis on mood and temperature, the land simply serving as a stage on which Mother Nature may give a dramatic performance.”
La Pointe studied architecture and art history and received her degree from the New School for Social Research in New York. She has studied painting in New York with Chris Anderson and has taken workshops with Philip Koch and Rosalie Nadeau. Her work is included in the permanent collect of the Cape Cod Museum of Art. She exhibits throughout New England at juried exhibitions and by invitation and is represented by the Harmon Gallery in Wellfleet, Mass. and by Brick Walk Fine Art in West Hartford, Conn.
