Zoe Lavatelli Leach

Artist Statement

Relatively small, bright oil paintings share wild brush strokes, biomorphic shapes, and similar palettes of mostly secondary colors. The paintings' content are varied: first, a long series of somewhat representational animal skulls held in fields of abstraction, and adorned with flowers, brushstrokes, diamonds, etc, which has been followed by the more recent series of abstract oil paintings of psychedelic busyness with loose suggestions of abstract human or animal-like heads in them. Many of the abstract works are adorned with cartoon tears, puddling into little lakes below. Some have trees or plants growing out of the heads, but all is happening within a cacophony of biomorphic shapes, lines, and fields of color, which are a nod to the intricate and awesome nature of the biosphere. The heads are apparition-like, ghostly representations of grief in a context of planet-wide destruction. I having been working through the many layers of grief and agony related to the collapse of both modern global industrial civilization and the 6th mass extinction. The inherently paradoxical nature of the beauty of human creation and the hideous destruction in its wake will continue to be explored through the work.