Flower Targets

The Roxbury Arts Group is extremely pleased to present Flower Targets, a solo exhibition of new work by local artist Laura Sue King. Flower Targets includes acrylic paintings on canvas and wood, and watercolor paintings on paper. An artist reception will take place on opening day, May 11, from 4-6pm.

As King writes, “my paintings are first about color. Knowledge of scientific and theoretical systems help me to feel a little more in control of what I’m doing in the studio, but this information doesn’t make good paintings. While choosing color is my focus as I begin each painting, it is surely the experience of color rather than the actual color that motivates me.”

There are two different tracks in the Flower Targets series: one, acrylic on canvas or plywood panel, highlights process and materiality. The image is finished to a plastic flatness that contrasts with the ground of the support. Additional “petals” surrounding the outermost band of the “target” reinforce the identity of the image, pushing the nonobjective subject to the edge of being representational.

The second group are painted in watercolor and pencil on paper. Formed through applying multiple layers of wet-on-dry washes that gradually become super saturated in the centers, these monochromatic Flower Targets evoke a density that is simultaneously spatial and spectral.

Laura Sue King was born in 1962 in Santa Barbara, California to a feminist schoolteacher and a hippie potter. Her focus on how we experience color in painting began as a graduate student in the renowned Hunter College Color School. King has exhibited in Argentina, China, Germany, Mauritius, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Great Britain, and the United States. She has been honored both as an artist and educator, receiving an AIM award from the Bronx Museum of the Arts, an international printmaking residency from the Mahatma Gandhi Institute on the island of Mauritius, and grants from Hunter College, the New School, and the State of New York. King teaches undergraduate studio art at Hunter College, where she has been an adjunct professor for thirty years. She lives full-time in Fleischmanns, NY with her partner and their two dogs.

All the works in this exhibition are available to purchase, including six watercolor paintings beautifully framed by Geoff Rogers in Pinehill. An accompanying book with additional images of paintings and essays by Nico Israel and Ursula Hudak can be obtained with your voluntary donation to the Roxbury Arts Group.

‘The Truth of Geometry’ – Laura Sue King, 2024

“There is always a drawing before I begin painting, but rarely is it a preparatory sketch. It is on the canvas or watercolor paper itself. I begin each painting by finding the center and drawing a circle using that point. The first circle marks the outside of the image, closest to the outside edges of the canvas or paper. The width of subsequent concentric bands moving towards the center is determined by the overall scale of the painting.

I don’t always know in advance if the drawing will be an octagon, decagon, or dodecagon. The shape of the “petals” is decided in the process of drawing, whether they curve or are triangular. I am terrible at math. 3% of the population scored lower than I did on the GRE. I got a D in geometry in high school.”