Mar 10, 2022

When the Figurative Dances with Abstract Works: Lauralee Franco

Lauralee Franco grew up in Staten Island and studied at Parsons School of Design. Here she was influenced by the paintings of Joan Snyder and Judy Glantzman. At Parsons she learned how to discard the academic in favor of the expressive in painting. After traveling in Europe, Lauralee obtained a masters degree in education from Lehman College. She then lived in the Bronx for ten years, teaching art in the East Tremont. She finally moved to Sea Cliff, where she currently lives and works together with her husband, her two sons and one daughter. Lauralee has exhibited her works at the Clio Art Fair in N.Y. This enabled her to further grow the work and push the boundaries of her painted compositions.

Art Dealer Street went to visit her in her Sea Cliff studio.

Lauralee Franco, Violence at the Capitol, oil paint and charcoal pencil on linen, 2021.

Lauralee Franco, All Streams Flow Into the Sea, Yet the Sea is Never Full, oil paint and charcoal pencil on linen, 2021.

Lauralee Franco, Us Together, oil paint and charcoal pencil on linen, 2017.

A flood in the artist’s studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn destroyed Lauralee’s early paintings. However, the experience of creating that body of work was invaluable to the artist. As Lauralee Franco often says, art is fragile and so is the human body. The artist almost died in childbirth more than once and had Covid in 2020. She wants the vulnerability of individuals to sickness and physical violence to be evident in her paintings, along with the joy of living. In our opinion, her artworks really capture the duality of the human life, its extreme fragility and its deep strength, opposite qualities that somehow merge together without cancelling the each other out but, rather, enforcing each other.

Painting is an action. Forming a cogent composition that works aesthetically is the foundation that enables this artist to translate human consciousness.

Visual art needs classifications, limits and definitions. The most common is that between figurative and abstract art. The art of Lauralee Franco seems to have been born to question this line, or rather to create a single bridge between these two styles. Born as an expressionist abstract artist, in the last few years of her career, Lauralee Franco decided to insert figurative input sharing the same speed and energy of realization as that not determined by any figure. Among the most recurring references you figured there is the human one - present in every race - and the sense of travel through the presence of means of transport and roads, rivers and streets.