The Linda A. Day Endowed Student Award
Lainey Atwood
2016 Linda A. Day Endowed Student Award Recipient
Lainey Atwood is a Southern California based artist, born and raised in Long Beach. Beginning at an early age and encouraged by her mother, an arts educator and enthusiast, Lainey studied ballet and painting simultaneously. During high school, she began working as a dance fitness instructor teaching older adults at various studios. While earning her B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach, she continued her teaching at CSULB’s recreation and fitness center while also painting windows for small business across the Long Beach community, including the woman-powered bakery, Scratch, where she serves when not painting.
As a student at CSULB she participated in a study abroad program in Nice, France with her beloved teacher Domenic Cretara. Her scholarships include the CSU summer arts scholarship and the Linda A. Day Endowed Student Award. Upon graduating, she participated in exhibitions at flatline art gallery in North Long Beach. Her work has also been exhibited at the University Art Galleries, Schomburg Gallery, Greenly Art Gallery, Bixby Art Expo, and the CSU Chancellors Office in Long Beach.
One, 82x60”, 2018 Collaged Canvas, acrylic and oil paints
Together 66x54”, 2018 Collaged Canvas, acrylic and oil paints
Artist Statement
Using a collage process, I assemble my physically layered paintings in order to communicate a physical state of becoming. Painting shifts to an even more personal level, creating depictions of human movement using my own body to personally dissect the canvas. Each painting depicts time, as I cut up the painted canvas, creating a more direct and tactile way to allude to the body in a transitory state, representing the incomplete bits of moments that make up the human experience of growth.
Characterized by dense overlapping and inclusion of collage immersed in their surfaces, through luscious marks of rich color, impasto paint, bare canvas, gestural brushstrokes, and bleeding drips, paint embeds layers of collage that speak to a choreography. I mimic elements in nature, further indicating that we are all inextricably connected to each other and our evolving universe.
I see the collage and painting process as a metaphor for sequential time and movement, like trying to remember a dream or a fleeting moment in which form is revealed. I’m excited to investigate in my work the human experience of converging forces of the body and mind, and how these rhythmic experiences relate to the natural world.
The figures are initially made of the same matter as the changing landscape. I feel a call to communicate through the senses and hearts of people. I aim to provoke an endless quality through painting and I hope my work activates something moving and familiar.