About Jan Lhormer
Born in Pittsburgh, PA
Lives & works Falmouth, Massachusetts
Jan Lhormer has exhibited widely throughout New England and beyond for over thirty years. Exhibition highlights include The Painting Center, NYC; Speedwell Projects Gallery, Portland, ME; The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Barnstable, MA; Lyman Eyer Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Creiger-Dane Gallery, Boston, MA; 808 Gallery, Boston, MA; Reynolds Ryan Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and Mendelson Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Duxbury Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA. Lhormer!s paintings are also showcased in Boston area offices through the DeCordova Museum Corporate Loan Program.
Lhormer!s work is held in many private collections and has been reviewed or featured in The Boston Globe, Cape Cod Life Arts Edition, and Cape Arts Review Magazine. She has won fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center For Creative Arts. In 2022 and 2023, Lhormer participated in a residency program administered by M. David & Co. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Lhormer received her MFA in Painting in 1990 from The Boston University School of Visual Arts, where she also received her BFA. She also holds a BA in Art History from Colorado College. She currently teaches painting and drawing at Bridgewater State University, and she has published articles in Provincetown Arts Magazine, Art New England, and Cape Arts Review. Lhormer lives and works in Cape Cod, MA.
Instagram: @janlhormer Website: www.janlhormer.com
Statement
I think of painting as a door to the spirit world, using nature as my pathway. The creative act serves as a ritual for me, requiring focus, reiteration, and devotion. My current bodies of work, Skyscapes and In the Garden, are reflective of this ritualistic process.
My studio practice is informed by the landscape of my surroundings on Cape Cod, and by my sensations of environmental shifts. I channel changes on the ground and fluctuations of light through sensual uses of color in various painting media, and by employing treatments suggestive of subjects that interrelate and overlap, and that are both tangible and ethereal.
In my Skyscapes, I use oil paint on canvas to meditate on and recreate my visions of the celestial sphere. Sometimes featuring hints of the sea as well, my sky paintings are abstractions related to various traditions associated with the sublime. I make them on large surfaces to create expansive, layered, and moody imagery, and I work from memory rather than direct observation. My process involves layers of gestural brushwork and occasional drips, yielding mysterious spheres in which forms emerge and fade away into atmospheric color. I might work on a single painting for weeks, months, or even years, building up and wiping down masses of paint until the image in my mind has evolved into a composition that both surprises and convinces me.
The imagery I conjure with my In the Garden series gives voice to the intangible world of emotion, the unseen, and the poetic. For these works, I apply colorful, saturated flourishes of India ink on heavy paper, and I indulge in intuitively descriptive lines and marks. I reference specific flowers and trees that flourish where I live, yet I resist exacting realism by elaborating carefully drawn forms with smudges, drips, and stages of redrawing. The botanicals I portray are both readily recognizable and substantially abstract, registering more as metaphorical as opposed to illustrative. These In the Garden works speak to the fragility of life and the importance of preserving our natural resources.
Paying close attention to nature allows us to acquire a sense of attachment to our surroundings, and helps to underscore the importance of preservation and sustainability. Through the ritual of my studio practice, my focused observations of trees, flowers, soils, clouds, light, and bodies of water have become essential for my well-being. Making images reflective of these experiences and convictions both challenges and enriches my sense of spirituality and connection to the world.