Wednesday Artist: Laurie Brownell McIntosh

I am drawn . . .  to what happens when you allow

 your everyday self to leave the room and let that

elusive creative hand step in and work. . . .

~ Laurie Brownell McIntosh

Columbia, South Carolina, visual artist Laurie Brownell McIntosh, a professional graphic designer with a bachelor's degree in fine art from the University of South Carolina, is something of a restless spirit when it comes to making art; she's always exploring the creative process via different mediums to find new ways to express her ideas, whether through line, color, pattern, or texture.

As McIntosh notes on her Website, she's studied the batik process, worked with oil pastels, and learned how to cast a narrative using multiple canvases and figurative images — her series All the In Between: My Story of Agnes tells her late mother's cradle-to-grave-story in more than 70 painted panels. (The series is published in a book of the same name. See image below.)

Cover Art

McIntosh also has moved on to abstraction, discovered and honed layering techniques, incorporated collage into her work, created encaustic pieces, and played with cutting apart and reassembling her images to make new visual connections. For her ongoing series Pages, for example, McIntosh deconstructs paintings with multiple grounds and layers of calligraphic-style marks and then rearranges and binds them unconventionally. She also regroups the images she does not cut up — what she refers to as Whole Pages. (I especially like McIntosh's Ladder Page.) 

The artist collaborates, too, most recently with novelist Jodie Cain Smith on the mixed-media piece New Nest. Empty Nest., which relates the two women's different stages of motherhood. In the past, she's also collaborated with North Carolina sculptor and metalsmith Jim Adams. (Read "Art Exhibit Benefits Penland, an Artists' Epicenter" in The State (2014) and "'Penland Connections' Offers Vibrant, Energetic & Playful Works" in Free Times (2014).

McIntosh, who has studied at the well-known Penland School of Crafts with Pinkney Herbert and Holly Roberts, at Anderson Ranch Arts Center with Roberto Juarez, and at Maine's Center for Creative Imaging, will have an exhibition at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808, in Columbia, November 12-29. An opening reception is planned for November 12.

Here's a brief video in which McIntosh talks about her work:

If you visit Columbia, head to Vista Studios, where McIntosh is a full-time resident artist in Studio 6.

Laurie Brownell McIntosh at Camellia Art

Laurie Brownel McIntosh's Dear People

Laurie Brownell McIntosh on FaceBook

Brownell McIntosh Graphic Design, Columbia, South Carolina (McIntosh is creative director.)