In Lauren Quin’s abstract paintings, the tube is an essential visual element. Arrow, 2020, sees the artist building the tube into her practice; the work is a signpost on the path between her earliest and most recent paintings. It embodies a moment of transition, and transcendence, in her work.

In 2017, while in residency in Skowhegan, Maine, Lauren Quin discovered the tube. She recalls the moment like an encounter with a cryptid: “I had never experienced pitch black as I did walking at night through the deep woods of Maine,” she says. “Your sense of depth is completely removed. You have to turn your flashlight off, because the light attracts bugs, and just remember that you’re on a path. I kept feeling like things were flying at me and I was being pushed through a tube.”ⁱ

Though Quin first encountered the tube in Maine, she did not “unlock” it as a mark-making tool until the end of her MFA program at Yale.ⁱⁱ Quin cites the work of Ferdinand Léger as key to unlocking the tube. Though the Cubist’s strict sense of structure was “antithetical” to Quin’s process, she felt inspired to make something with an “organizational tool,” like Léger: something like a tube.ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

Arrow builds off the visual language of Quin’s work at Yale, and points towards her mature practice. As in earlier work, Arrow contains multiple, smaller elements on one canvas, in the form of identifiable layers of work. Quin begins with a base of turquoise, blue, and silver; she adds rays of yellow and black, then black and cream. The middle layer of black and cream, with counter-facing brushstrokes, give the appearance of two spirals in moiré effect, side by side. These visual elements shift before the eye when approaching the canvas, like an optical illusion settling itself out in real time.

 

After spreading her base colors and tubes, Quin uses a palette knife or rag dipped in turpentine to trace dissolving spirals through the gradients of color, creating a blurred visual effect. As her last step, she transfers a layer of drawings in red ink on top of her painted layers. These drawings come from her sketchbook, and their abstracted lines add new tubular routes across Arrow. 

Quin has continued to push the visual elements she put to work in Arrow; in the past two years, her compositions have grown in scale, depth, and brightness of color, and her top layers of transferred drawings (often, still, in red), are increasingly intricate. Arrow is a site of experimentation; her openminded and playful brushstrokes layer into stylistic breakthrough. The painting records an essential moment in Quin’s career, as she comes into her own visual language as an artist.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

Recent and Concurrent Solo Exhibitions:

 

Overland Park, Kansas, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, My Hellmouth, October 20, 2022 – April 23, 2023.

 

Shanghai, China, Pond Society, Sagittal Fours, September 24 – October 31, 2022.

 

Los Angeles, Blum & Poe, Pulse Train Howl, May 14 – June 25, 2022.

 

• Quin’s work has recently been acquired by major institutions, including The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others.

ⁱ Lauren Quin, quoted in Stephanie Eckhardt, “In the Studio with Lauren Quin, the Painter Doing Abstraction Her Own Way,” W Magazine, July 8, 2021, online.
ⁱⁱ Lauren Quin, quoted in Janelle Zara, “Painter Lauren Quin Explores a New, Electric Type of Mark,” Cultured Magazine, December 7, 2021, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Lauren Quin, quoted in Eckhardt.