Question:

I would like someone to ask me why, in an art world that loves fashion, entertainment and spectacle, and in an age that loves movies and social media, I keep on painting small abstract paintings.
A lot of your paintings suggest cartoon animal shapes. Could you talk about this?

Answer:

Although I don’t aim to “depict” cartoony animal shapes, in just about every painting I’ve painted since 2000, I’ve introduced what I think of as wacky shapes, derived indirectly from comics, that suggest cartoony noses, mouths, eyes, ears and legs. I think my temperament, which tends to be both cheerful and skeptical, shows up not only in these shapes, but also in my color–which is fairly harmonious, but also a bit vulgar and brassy. But for all my interest in the comic, I also sincerely yearn for my paintings to suggest an ordered universe.  My paintings wouldn’t be mine without shapes that suggest this order. To me, then, my pictures contain elements that are in a tight, tense balance–cartoony shapes on the one hand, and the shapes of the ordered world of geometry on the other.

The challenge I’ve posed for myself is to find a way to bring together the particular humor of funny shapes with the eternal shapes of geometry, thereby letting the world of geometry bring a classicizing, stabilizing force to my comic elements.

As every artist knows, both the devil and the divine lurk in the details, and perfecting the details of my paintings–the edges, the various shapes and colors–is how I spend my time.

http://lauriefendrich.com/

A Lying Fool, 2015, oil on canvas, 36 x 34 inches

Humming Bird, 2015, oil on canvas, 36 x 34 inches

Really?, 2015, oil on canvas, 36 x 34 inches

One Question/One Answer is a series of very, very brief conversations about art and life between Romanov Grave and a variety of extraordinarily interesting artists.