SeanMcLaughlin

Sean McLaughlin is a freelance artist and writer who journals his connection and devotion to myth and the common object in intimate drawings, in large scale oil paintings, in amulets, and in essays and short stories.  Historically, he was represented by the Jayne H. Baum Gallery, New York, through the 1980s with significant additional shows at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 301 East Houston, and The Exhibition Space at 112 Green Street New York.  He has shown with John Cage, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra, Paul Rotterdam, and Sue Coe.  Involved with the education of aesthetics, culture, and mythology, he has lectured and taught at the University of Minnesota, The Cooper Union in conjunction with Lincoln Center and Juilliard, and for the J. Paul Getty Trust, among others.  As a Project Director of Art and Criticism for the New Museum, New York, he was pivotal in educating and writing about the nature of the artistic process.  Since his major retrospective of drawings, paintings, and writing at The Museum of Foreign Art in Riga, Latvia, he has been working through private commissions.   He currently researches and writes a quarterly newsletter on the history and mythology of Central Europe for his folk art gallery, Baltic Imports, with 1300+ subscribers.  He lives and works between his studio in Saint Paul, MN, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, and Riga, Latvia.

 

Artist Statement

My art is devoted to the mythological moment and the elevation of the common object and experience.  It is made using common materials: simple graphite on natural papers, burnt wood and bone pigments, colors from children’s watercolor tins, and little words that one finds in the words of others. 

 

With such unassuming materials I make intimate drawings, large-scale paintings, amulets and written stories based on perception and memory, all of which journal the observations of the simple that touch the mythic and, by so doing, transform the commonplace. 

 

Aesthetically, such a process of transformation is an old concept.  Known as  “Sarvam” in Sanskrit, it is the “all” or “everything” enfolding in a loop of cognitive intuition.  Traditionally we have used the very same mythic process in the West, time and time again in our cultural history, to seek the echo behind the word, which in turn will lead us to the word “within” the word.

 

Such a process allows me to create something from the commonality of our human experience that is authentic as well as numinous, that is basic, yet transformative, while always being meditative.  Making meditative art allows me to use any methodology that will focus reflection and allow that reflection to become more.  Single green oak leaves in perfect white bowls.  A small drawing of warm, wet breath against cold, still glass.  A black and white large-scale oil painting of almost white rime that rests on the dark slats of a fallen garden fence.    A thousand inked tattoos, which in decorating white napkins, hold simple sorrowful words.

 

Valuing process as much as form, I have always sought to share that moment when the artist knows that a work is complete and what that completeness means.  I do that through a journal of words.  To me the distilled reflections of such words born in the artistic process are essential in adding to the transformation of a work.  There are a thousand separate stories when one gathers darkness on the edge of a brush and paints it wet on white.  Enfolding those stories into a single, larger evocative union has become my work and my homage to sustaining, transforming myth.