Corinne Lapin-Cohen
Environmental concerns have always figured prominently in my life and my art.
I have painted traditional botanical watercolors for 25 years, taught botanical art at the New York Botanical Gardens and Lehman College, and exhibited at major arboretums, museums and galleries. My work is in the permanent collection of The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, Pa.
Currently I am painting large abstract oil paintings on unstretched canvas. The natural world and environmental issues continue to be my focus. Experiences, sensations and memories inspire me to give visual voice to the beauty, fragility and ephemeral nature of our world. Working on large unstretched canvas allows you to enter the painting and become part of the story. When the canvas is unstretched it will react to the surroundings.
Glazing transparent layers of pure pigments over and over again allows your eye to see through the layers, the light to bounce back and create infinite changes of glowing color. I call this "optical mixing” because your eye does the mixing. I do not mix my colors on a pallet, nor do I use white or black.
I am able to be spontaneous and immediate as I move, make marks, and dance my way over the surface of a canvas. These works are open-ended improvisations.
Each series of paintings is a narrative guided by passion.
My work is a balance between pure abstraction and identifiable subject matter. The ambiguity of meaning allows the paintings to have multiple layers of interpretation.
When drawing with metalpointe, I use silver and gold, on specially prepared paper. This is also a layering process because too much pressure with the stylus on the paper, will leave an indentation or hole. Over time the metals oxidize and a change of color occurs. These become “living drawings” as they will continue to tarnish and alter over a lifetime.
In college I double majored in art and education. My graduate work in the 70’s was in environmental preservation. An internship as a naturalist at The Audubon Center in Greenwich, Ct. allowed my environmental concerns to be combined with art. My work is layered with environmental awareness.
I live in Katonah, NY, and teach drawing and painting in my studio, StoneHouse Studio.
“Nature has remained my inspiration for over 40 years; and the diversity of nature has lead to the diversity in my work. Just as the universe is constantly evolving, so is my art. Change is one constant in life, and as an artist, I am fortunate to be receptive and embrace it. Through the studio process, my work becomes a visualization of my inner self- my experiences, my energies, my thoughts, my emotions.”
Corinne Lapin-Cohen
“In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” A.Camus
To view Corinne’s resume, click here.