artists
Emma Lugo
medium: Painting
Artist Statement:
As an artist, my primary concerns for most of my adult life have revolved around the themes of randomness and absurdity. I turn quite regularly to my sources of artistic inspiration for informing my work – the writings of the existentialists, primarily Sartre and Camus, the collective work of the Bauhaus both in Germany and its reincarnation in America, the paintings and writings of Vincent Van Gogh, the writings of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and the collected writings of Emma Goldman. I have also been influenced by modernity, particularly by Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta and performance artist Jack Smith.
For almost two decades my focus was primarily on mixed media collage, and I worked with a variety of source materials including crazy quilt scrap fabric, industrial automobile parts, mass-produced magazines from the 1950s and personal autobiographic detritus. During this phase in my artistic career I was obsessed with the possibilities of collage and assemblage and worked in the areas of textiles, altered books and collage scrolls. After 20 years of collage I have returned to painting.
Artist Bio:
I studied at the University of Minnesota in the Studio Arts department, studying painting, sculpture, video and performance art. Since the days of my university studies I have been primarily active as a painter and maker of mixed media arts. I have also dappled with digital media but not very much. I think of myself primarily as a painter right now. I am especially interested in pictographs of the Pacific Northwest, isolated desert landscapes of eastern Oregon and floral arrangements.
