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Between Worlds
How Lori Lorion breaks the barrier between reality and expressionistic imagination
The Advocate
Lori Lorion paced slowly amid guests at the Visual Arts Gallery Wednesday afternoon, speaking in a meticulously abstract way, with a defined sense of ardor.
“It’s all in your body, none of it is in your head,” Lorion said of the energy she calls her “gifts.” “There’s a certain point when my body tells me it’s time to stop. Then there’s times when it tells me to go, even though my mind says ‘no, you don’t know what to do.’ Sometimes I go with my gut even though I don’t know what to do. Sometimes it turns out well and sometimes it’s horrible.”
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Lorion spoke at the reception for her exhibit that will be on display in the Visual Arts Gallery until April 24. This is her second year displaying her exhibit “Portraits from the Inside Out,” which consists entirely of her original work.
Lorion is teaching painting, drawing and some digital art this quarter and has been an art instructor at MHCC since 2004. But she has been a teacher for much longer than that, off and on. Prior to MHCC, she taught at Reedly Community College in the Central Valley of California. Her 15 years of teaching have led her here, though her artistic odyssey began years before.
“I had an uncle who was an artist and we had this giant painting of his up on our wall,” Lorion recalls with a quiet demeanor. “My brother was always drawing and bringing home art books as well.
"They were considered the ‘artists’ of the family, while I was more ‘hiding out.’ In a sense I’m still doing that. Over the years, I’ve spent so much time painting, I’m aware that what I say is secondary to what people may think. When talking about art, speech really falls short. It’s better to simply leave the talking to the art itself, or the critics. They do enough talking for the rest of us.”
Lorion says she enjoys teaching because unlike some of the rest of the populous, you can tell students the truth. “They’re not yet cynical enough,” said Lorion with a slight grin.
Art, to her, is something that goes beyond the reality of the daily grind. Is it therapeutic, or perhaps meditative?
“[Art] allows you to be more conscious of who you are,” said Lorion. “Painting is a meditation, but different in the sense that every range of emotion is expressed.”
That emotion in the meditative form is difficult to put into words, she says, but she compares it to an athlete being “in the zone” and having a career day.
“When you’re in ‘it,’ things come to you. You’re aware of the magic and synchronicity of the way things work. Things might come to me days later, or I’ll see something or read something that triggers an idea. Everything feeds into everything else — how magical in both horrible and wonderful ways things are. Artists live in all of the horrors and beauty of life itself. All artists.”
Lorion says she has a lot of favorites when it comes to other artists and things that have influenced her. She has separate favorites for color uses, ideas, value structure, or simply how an artist’s mind works, but she cites Nathan Oliviera, Odd Nerdrum, Jenny Saville, Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon as some of her favorites. She uses these influences as inspiration on how to “get things to work.”
“Other artists teach you things,” she said. “Looking at other artists is really enriching.”
How those inspirations have turned her into the artist she is today has been a journey of the imagination, with years of trial and error.
“After this long, I no longer think about things — I just do them” Lorion said. “One of the wonderful things about getting older is having these new-found powers, and with each year there is more and more. The passion is still there, but it’s sort of a metamorphosis. It’s a different kind of passion.”
Like most artists, Lorion hates categorizing her art, but she admits that it’s necessary to having intelligent conversations about art.
“My work is very expressionistic. I use a lot of thick paint. I don’t know if I like it, but it’s who I am. It’s as natural to me as the color of my eyes. A lot of my work is also figurative, very figure-based. I don’t know if that figure will always be there, but it’s there now and has been for a while. It’s not good or bad, or right or wrong, it’s just an expression of my current state.”
Lorion says that her work always takes her toward some elusive “figure” – part of the inspiration for which came to her when she saw a vagrant on a street that only stared at her. Lorion said that she went home and immediately began to paint, and before she knew it had manifested this vagrant onto her canvas. Upon doing a second work, she realized that she had begun a small series, or transformation, of three variations of this person.
Thirty-three paintings (31 of which she did in the last two years) hang in the Visual Arts Gallery with a distinct stamp on them, not one of which Lorion can say is her favorite.
“There is not one painting in here that is like how I imagined it would be when I first started to work on it,” said Lorion. “I don’t know where I want my work to go, I just want my painting to get better. I want to make really good art.”
Asked at her reception how she wants to progress as an artist, she said simply, “Hopefully, 10 years from now I’ll look back at this body of work and think that it’s bad.”
Whether the “figure” will still be there, she says, has yet to be seen.