Featured Artist Elinore Schnurr

Elinore Schnurr presents a fascinating portfolio of captured moments in layered transparencies. See more from this artist by visiting her website.

 

 

In this most recent series of paintings, I am working with images that are first captured with a digital camera as I pass by bars and cafes with glass windows that reflect the images of the street and intermix with the images of the people inside and the interior spaces of the bars and cafes.

 

 

It’s a kind of voyeurism, walking about snapping pictures with a digital camera, a camera with a sensor so powerful that it can almost see in the dark.  I love night scenes; I love the random shot, the blurred shot, the unexpected view. At Times Square, my favorite source of imagery, there is an added dimension of media images from electronic billboards reflecting and distorting the people who are having a drink on the other side of the glass. Media images have become part of our immediate reality, cutting into our collective sense of self.

 

 

Reflections, and motion when caught with a camera, create transparencies and multiple layers that become the building blocks from which my paintings are constructed. These building blocks weave the layers together, creating patterns that become ways of seeing the immediate world in front of us, behind us, and multiple views in between. The reflected reality is often visually indistinguishable from the physical reality; the two blending together in a flattened and collage-like way.

 

 

I have always been a figurative painter, but not always with the same focus. There was not much contemporary figurative painting visible in the New York galleries in the late ‘60s when I came to New York City after graduating from the Cleveland Institute of Art. The marketplace was dominated by abstract, op, pop, etc.

 

 

So I felt, as a figurative painter, I was pretty much on my own. Edward Hopper was a strong influence at the beginning; solid figures that were somber and hollow-seeming, influenced by my angst with suddenly being in New York City and confronted by thousands of unknowable people. The Vietnam war brought conflict and blood on the streets; my figures became transparent, one could walk through them, a kind of escape. I had a strong interest in quantum mechanics and further explored the possibilities of painting forms that were not solid, but were made up of small particles of paint.

 

 

It seems as though, all along, my basic concern has been with the sense of disconnectedness that I felt among and between people, which has been a strong force in all my figurative paintings. The multiple layering of the current “Outside Looking In” series is but a current manifestation of this concern.

 

 

As for goals, it has always been a necessity for me to express myself through painting. It is a visual language that I must speak. This necessity has under-girded all my decisions in life and gets me out of bed in the morning.