Laura Owens

From The New Yorker
www.owenslaura.com

“'I don’t believe there’s such a thing as innate talent,' she said. 'It’s about desires and passions that lead to a focus on certain things and seeing the world in a certain way.'”
 
"In a journal that Owens kept in her early twenties, she wrote a fourteen-point list entitled 'How to Be the Best Artist in the World.' Among the dictates: 'Think big,' 'Contradict yourself constantly,' 'No Guilt,' 'Do not be afraid of anything,' 'Say very little,' and 'Know that if you didn’t choose to be an artist— You would have certainly entertained world domination or mass murder or sainthood.'”
 
“'Send your poems out into the world,' she told a girl who said that she wrote poetry—and resilience. 'When you make a mistake, see what’s good about it,' she said. 'Mistakes are little windows into what is possible.'” 
 
"'it’s a matter of hearing the work, after walking past it all day.'”

"Gestural and color-field abstraction, digital imaging, American folk art, Japanese landscape, children’s-book illustration, dropped shadows, greeting-card whimsy, clip art, wallpaper design, silk screen, tapestry, typography, stencils, recorded-sound elements, and mechanical moving parts (in one series of paintings, shapes with hidden motors function like clock hands) take turns or combine. Slam-bang visual impact co-occurs with whispering subtlety. Owens’s art imparts a sense, from first to last, of being in the middle of a process that doesn’t evolve but that spreads, deltalike, from a mysterious headwater."
 
"You know at a glance that they are by Owens, not from their looks, which are miscellaneous, but from how they feel: vaguely familiar and acutely strange.
The works often suggest to me the state of mind of a new mother too tired to think while too dedicated not to work. Owens confirmed the impression in an e-mail: 'Being a mom and still making art involves absolutely opposite parts of your brain. One is really selfish and the other is absolutely selfless.'” 
 
"Her works sell briskly to devoted collectors but less well on the investment-minded secondary market, which favors reliable product lines."