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.
Discovering art was my escape from many of my challenges. At birth, I suffered Right Sided Peripheral Nerve Damage that caused physical and learning obstacles. I had to create new pathways in my brain to compensate and overcome the impacts of the nerve damage, often making zero progress through the many therapies undertaken. No one would guess that I had these obstacles as I danced with Ballet Minnesota and attended a top high school and college. I was constantly surrounded by art because of my mom’s love for the arts, including her collection in our home. She would take me to museums to view the numerous influential masters that challenged the conventional art world. Observing thousands of paintings consisting of portraits, landscapes, and animals throughout my childhood, made it inevitable I would fall in love with art. My connection with art became deeper once I started to paint.
I started to paint in the seventh grade where I was instructed to create a self-portrait by observing myself in a mirror, creating a colorful cubist self-portrait with a blank stare. Painting became very natural to me, and I painted all throughout high school. In my first series, I created consecutive portraits of my cousin, Vincent, who greatly suffered and later died from Osteosarcoma. He was 13 when he became sick, I was four. Vincent left this realm when he was 17. I only remembered him in the hospital and not who he was as a healthy person, very beloved by my entire family. I created a series of four works, each representing one of the years that Vincent was sick that allowed me to heal. Encapsulated in these paintings are my attempt to communicate the numerous emotions that he might have experienced during his treatments and the progressive toll they took on his body. In the portraits, I leveraged angular bold shapes and color to show the sadness and anger on his face, and in the end, defeat. This led me down the path of painting subject matters that deal with the devastating side of humanity, but also joy and happiness. I spent most of my undergraduate studies exploring the many facets of emotion on the human face as well as other art mediums.
Today, my art has evolved into other subject matters besides the people that I love. I am now painting the victims of the Ukrainian War. My goal for these paintings is to show the gruesome realities of war for civilians. For example, I was inspired to complete a painting in the spring of 2022 of an injured female Ukrainian war victim. Later that summer, a Ukrainian exchange student at our home was flipping through my paintings and stopped at the portrait I had painted the prior spring. She began to cry. She explained my portrait was of her mother’s best friend and 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.
I draw my inspiration from the artists of Vincent van Gogh and European Expressionists of Max Beckmann, Richard Gertsl, Emil Nolde and Alexej von Jawlensky. I use these artists to inspire me to capture the complex human emotions that are sometimes difficult to articulate. These painters allow me to expand my subject matter into the greater context of the world, which I hope to continue in the future with my paintings.