Louise LeBourgeios, a New Orleans born artist, is going to throw her first solo show in Japan.
LeBourgeios paints the sceneries as a mixture of memories from her travelling childhood and longing for unvisited places.
"Maybe it’s because I am a traveler and have been since I was very young, I hold far away places in my mind. I paint landscapes from my imagination, sometimes based on places I’ve been and sometimes from photographs. But in my paintings I always depart from how a specific place looks. The image in the painting becomes a mixture of what’s out there in the “real” world and what resides in my head.
I have never been to the moon, obviously, but I like that people all over the world see the same moon in the same phase on the same day. It holds us together in a gentle way.
I live in Chicago, only a short walk from Lake Michigan, where I swim in the summertime. I love the open water, but I also fear it. Swimming in the lake is a dive into an unpredictable wilderness, an encounter with nature that, as a city dweller, I don’t otherwise experience. When I paint my water/sky paintings, I rely on my memory of how water looks and feels.
Whether it is visible or not, the horizon is my favorite part of the whole image. I see it as a playful paradox inherent to life on this big round planet of ours, and something that we all long for. The visible yet non-existent line that describes a curve is imaginary place where as far as we can see reveals that there is yet more to come."
- artist's statement
As the cloudy grey sky gives a hint of the sun shining above and the moon's surface indicates the land spreading beneath, LeBourgeois's paintings inspires us of what are not described on the canvases. It is as if the horizon, she paints an elusive and vague world where we see everything and nothing at the same time.