Music is the metaphor for Laura Berman whose improvisational process creates beautiful, multifaceted monoprints. Her intuitive approach of arranging printing plates and choosing ink bodies is strikingly simple in its density, punctuated by bursts of experimentation much like the merging of sounds of musicians settling into an unexpected groove.
Born in Spain, and having lived in many locales, Berman happily acknowledges that she has “no ancestral home or landscape,” but she is not without place. She creates intimate space for herself by filling her surroundings with the objects and collections that evoke home. Indeed, she creates her home wherever she is be it Kansas City, MO where she maintains her vigorous studio practice; Alfred, NY where she earned her BFA; New Orleans, LA where she earned her MFA, or Matfield Green, KS where she and her husband opened the Matfield Outpost, an artist retreat in the unfettered landscape of the Flint Hills.
Berman’s printmaking practice explores layering, transparency, color, and the gestures of simple forms within complex compositions. Her precious reserve of rocks, a physical manifestation of her nomadic history, stands at the forefront of her homemaking objects and also serves as a lifelong muse for her work. Berman compares the rocks to her practice saying, “each rock is a metaprint of its own self. Even if two rocks originated side by side from the same landscape they are singularly different, they have their own story, their own set of forces that created them, their own material makeup. A rock is a monoprint.”
While harvesting her collection, she has filled a creative well responsible for nourishing her series Rock Piles I and II. Rock Piles I examines lifelike, scale renderings of her collection with a focus on texture and mass: each pile is splayed with a sense of purposeful arrangement, but with an organic sense of gravity as each lump is pulled down presumably to its grassy nest or water soaked creek socket. Rock Piles II examines rock forms pared down to their primal shape and enlivened with rich color palettes. The focus shifts from the rocks themselves to spatial relationships, color families, layering, and further exploration of her improvisational instincts.
In subsequent series, Berman continues to manipulate her delicately chaotic rock forms examining depth and space (Supernovas), as well as long, geometric slices (Umbra:R), rounded, tubular shapes (Umbra:F) and bleeds of layered voids (Coronae) into magical monoprints. In these later bodies of work color moves to the forefront of each composition as she blankets dozens of transparent colors, romancing this visual language as it pertains to taste, mood and notions of memory and nostalgia. The color palettes Berman chooses build from the original ink body and continue to iterate, layer after layer, thus creating a communal voice that sings throughout her portfolio. Indeed, loose, organic shapes give way to sharper, geometric forms, but the aesthetic is akin to the voice of her skipping stones and sand buried rocks: simple compositions engage and transform a boundless sheet of white into a charming experience.
– Halcombe Miller