Shades Advancing by Laurie Pace Story Tellers Mirada Fine Art 2016

Laurie Justus Pace

SHADES ADVANCING 24 x 48 Oil on Canvas

Mirada Fine Art Story Tellers 2016

laurie justus pace “Viewing a Laurie Pace Painting is a rich experience that drips with color and emotion. Her passionate works are alive with movement and texture boldly created with a palette knife. Constantly pushing the edge, she loves working in oils, dramatically carving out the thick paint, fluid with color and bursting with energy.�

Steve Sonnen, Mirada Fine Art

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As splintering light fractions into thousands of colors, Laurie’s journey in life has encompassed many careers: from runway model to graphic artist, from musician to singer, from teacher to artist. She believes the greatest influence in her life is the beauty God provides daily.

A degree in art, ten years with an advertising agency, and thirty-seven years teaching art have brought her full circle to top honors at international art shows in oil, watercolor and photography. Constantly pushing the edge, Laurie presses in her work to celebrate and discover. Her compositions are fluid, with color and dimension setting the pace for a unique painting journey each time.

Her artwork has been published and featured in numerous magazines, newspapers and books. She has been a featured artist in Western Art Collector, Appaloosa Journal, American Art Collector, Cowboys and Indians and the Dallas Morning News. Her work has been published on the covers of Appaloosa Journal and The Sighthound Magazine, as well as on several yearbooks, publications and music CD’s.

LauriePace.com

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Shades Advancing Laurie Justus Pace http://www.whitetreestudio.ie/

Story Tellers Mirada Fine Art 2016

Laurie Justus Pace Shades Advancing ““But I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey... They are both oaks, even if they were planted in different forests. But then, m’lord, we all suffer in our different ways from being prisoners of birth.” Jeffrey Archer “In life nothing is black or white... there are always shades of gray. Shades of truth and lies. It is easy to label things good or bad. We want to compartmentalize everything into boxes we can control. By doing that we limit ourselves. Life is more complex. We need to stop labeling things and open ourselves to new experiences.” Laurie Pace

Once upon a time... I hit the wall. I felt overwhelmed by the continued use of vibrant color and wanted a break. I had painted a single horse in black and white acrylic and loved it. So it became time to try a series in black and white in oils.Time to simplify.

The difference in painting on this piece was not having the color to help define my journey. Everything would have to be based on values of black and white and gray, the composition, the elements and form.

Until this point, I have only painted by energy, color and lots of music. It was time to cIimb out of the box and paint a new journey.

You can see by the first photo at the right top, I worked on the composition where I felt shapes should be placed. What was to be painted on the surface did not matter. As I brought in the darkest of the blacks, I assumed it was time to look around and see if horses were dancing across or appearing from shapes.

I etched my ponies by knife into the thick underpainting. Next I began to lay in values to create their substance. It almost worked... but something did not feel quite right. When I paint like this I take photos into Photoshop and look at them in reverse. This is how I look at the

“whole” from a new perspective. Everything out of balance will show up out of place; things not sketched correctly will look odd or stretched to fit.

I truly do not remember my original thoughts as I gaze at these photos today. It seemed trite at the time, too simplistic.

I do remember I almost gave up...but there is a strong love for me of black and white photography and its timeless beauty. Timeless elegance is what I was after in this painting.

Using my knife, I scraped the formed horses into a full pull, bringing the dark values into the composition defining volume. I moved paint around and redistributed it through out the original blocking from the first photo. I stepped back and thought about it and decided to try instead my collected painted pony pulls in this monochromatic scheme.

I emailed Steve at Mirada to seek his opinion before I began. He agreed it would be something unique in many ways. Knife in hand, you can see in the third photo where I began to seriously carve horses into the five or six layers of paint on the canvas. The easy part is moving the paint around and identifying the edges before progressing with more defined layers.

Story Tellers Mirada Fine Art 2016

Laurie Justus Pace Shades Advancing

II am sorry I did not have better photos saved from this piece. But if you look closely on the opposite page you can see the etched out horses with outlines.

The painting is 24 x 48 and this shot is only a portion of the piece. There are four strong horses galloping toward you at full speed. Normally I would work in odd numbers but this is where I went opposite of the norm again. Black and white and no color; four horses instead of three or five.

The world did not come to an end.

I used up over thirty tubes of monochromatic gray paints in all values. Holbein stopped making them a few years prior and I combed the countryside seeking the older tubes of paint.

Why you ask? Yes, I could mix my shades, but I would not be able to match.

I was in luck and found two places that had old back stock and I purchased it all. One was local and I picked it up immediately because I work wet. I knew I wanted to do more in this series so I purchased 80 tubes of paint. I wanted the series to be congruent and defined.

With the horses carved in, it was now time to begin dropping in more values to pull them forward, defining muscles and movement. Again, I would normally rely on color and contrast to energize the painting. I truly was ‘working in the dark’ If you study the final painting, you will discover the horizon line that stayed stable through out

this entire process. A third of the way down on the left side you can trace it crossing the canvas behind and through the horses. On the right side you have an angled thrust of lighter tones from the upper corner through the center actually landing at the base of a cross in the lower right at the bottom before the corner.

Can you see the cross in the painting? There is a down pull of black turning to white creating a cross to the left side of the painting. The swatch of energy flows from that upper right corner to the base of the cross.

Now look at the feet of each pony. They are all on a defined path. The cross defines the path of the first horse left, with powerful black outlining the cross. The next horse is defined by an angled mid gray path which has a single added color of Verditer Blue pulled through it. The third horse from the left has a vertical path of both gray and white providing its journey. The last horse on the far right is on a light path surrounded and defined by black. In a way it mirrors the first horse. I call that balance.

The Verditer Blue was added as my signature color. At this time in my painting career all of my work had Verditer Blue in the composition. I chose carefully the angle and positioning in this painting.

I did a total of five pieces in this series and they all grew with each piece into stronger pieces.

You can see them all on the back of this catalogue. These are the only paintings I will ever do in black and white. They are each named for music or poems that were part of their creation.

Story Tellers Mirada Fine Art 2016

Laurie Justus Pace

Shades Advancing 24 x 48 inches Oil on Canvas

Laurie Justus Pace

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These are the four other paintings in the Black and White Series.

Midnight Gathering Oil 36 x 36

Evening Shadows When the Star Appear Dinner for Two Oil 30 x 40

Midnight Rendezvous Dinner for Two Oil 36 x 36

Neither Black or White Oil 36 x 36

Mirada Fine Art Story Tellers 2016