Laura Dronzek
medium: painting
wisconsin arts board artist fellowship award winner, 1998
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Contact information
Artist resides in: Madison, WI
Artist statement
My recent paintings combine landscapes with animals or human figures. I often use photographs of animals as a general reference and then let the composition and landscape emerge as I build up the surface. My landscapes are fictive and often involve recombining the most basic elements of landscapes: a tree, water, horizon. I juxtapose the grand themes of landscape painting with the small scale of the work.
In "Middlemarch," George Eliot states that: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." For me, it is the mystery found in the commonplace, the extraordinary in the ordinary, that is worth examining.
Biography
Education
1993--M.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
1982-1990--Enrolled in art classes, University of Wisconsin-Madison
1982--B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
1979-1980--Wake-Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Honors and Awards
1998--Wisconsin Arts Board 1998 Individual Fellowship Award
1994--Wisconsin Arts Board 1994-95 Individual Artist Grant
1993 Award of Honor, "Watercolor Wisconsin '93," Charles A. Wustum Museum, Racine, Wisconsin
Public Collections
Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin
Gardiner Art Gallery, Stillwater, Oklahoma
Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison