Lauren Woessner's Art
I am a painter that uses bold colors and brush strokes to express emotions and movement. I primarily paint portraits to express the true emotions that we all experience. I use my inspiration from the Impressionist and German Expressionist movements.
About Lauren Woessner
My love of art started with my mom introducing me to her passion for art, specifically for the Impressionist Movement. We would go to museums monthly and she would talk for hours about the Impressionists. She explained to me what made the Impressionists unique by bravely breaking away from classical painting. I was always surrounded by art because my home has numerous paintings on our walls. My mother’s art collection was displayed as if we were in a salon. There were a variety of subject matters that consisted of portraits, landscapes, and animals. I was always the most drawn to portraits because they showed the many emotions that humans experience.
I started to paint in the seventh grade where I was instructed to create a self-portrait by observing myself in a mirror. I created a colorful cubist self-portrait with a blank stare. A few years later in the ninth grade, my artwork developed into a more serious subject matter that showed the darker, sadder side of life. My cousin, Vincent, was terminally diagnosed with Osteosarcoma when he was thirteen, and passed away at the age of seventeen. When he became sick, I was four and he left this realm when I was eight. The only memories I have of Vincent are when he was sick in the hospital and not who he was as a healthy person. I felt a lot of guilt about this because he was very beloved by my family. I started to create a series of four paintings, each representing each year that he was sick that allowed me to heal. Throughout the paintings I showed the numerous emotions that he might have experienced during his treatments and the longer they were going on it showed the toll on his body. In the portraits I have created many angular bold shapes that show the sadness and anger on his face. This led me down a path of painting subject matters that deal with the devastating side of humanity, but also the happiness and love in life.
The summer before eleventh grade I took a pre-college course at Minneapolis College of Art and Design where I expanded the subject matter of my cousin Vincent. I continued to paint my cousin, Vincent. What I added was his namesake, little Vincent, who was the child of Vincent’s sister Rhyan. I wanted to show the happiness between the two related souls, as a tribute to both. In my undergraduate career at Skidmore College, I continued my study of painting portraits. I was able to move on to other members of my family, I painted my grandmother that I never met and my Nana who had dementia. Painting her was extremely mentally exhausting and artistically difficult because she was the first family member that I really knew who we lost to a slow death. Through these different relationships, dealing with loss and death, I was drawn towards European Expressionism, specifically the artists of Max Beckmann, Richard Gertsl, Emil Nolde, and Alexej von Jawlensky.
Today, my art has evolved into other subject matters besides the ones that I love. I am now painting the victims of the Ukrainian War. These paintings consist of showing the gruesome realties for civilians. I did not realize the impact my work would have on others when I completed a painting in the spring of 2022. I found a photo of a woman war victim who was injured that inspired me to do her portrait. I continued to paint the victims and subject matter of this war. Over the summer of 2022, my family and I hosted a Ukrainian exchange student through a program called You Lead. It is a leadership program that allows Ukrainian teen aged students to learn about different forms of leadership so they can take those skills to rebuild Ukraine, once the war is over. During Labor Day weekend, my family hosted a party for over twenty exchange students, chaperons, and host families. One of the chaperons was flipping through my many paintings of Ukrainian War and its victims. She stopped at the initial portrait of the war victim I had painted the prior spring and began to cry. She explained that my portrait was of her mother’s best friend and that the bombing happened on the second day of the war. It was in that moment, I realized how powerful my art can be for others in expressing life’s tragedies.
