Reviews |
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"While the fact Laura Epler's art does not fit into a specific category may seem a weakness, it is actually a strength. The paintings do not need categorization; they are beyond that need in both their emotional content and their technical ability. The paintings move back and forth from hints of subject matter to abstraction, from didactic to spiritual. One senses she started where Rothko and Pollock ended, infusing them with post-modernist concerns of journalizing, mysticism and feminism. The results are paintings, which can be read only on a solitary level, requiring intelligence and intuition. Gazing into the paintings, almost falling into them, one feels the layers of paint symbolic of expression and discovery. Then, upon realizing the connectedness of it all - essentially life and art - the satisfaction arrives. Watching these paintings evolve, I have seen the artist take a lifetime of self-exploration and translate it onto canvas. The work continues to amaze me as it reveals painterly and spiritual sensations far beyond the limits of expectation." - Don Lambert is a freelance writer and curator. His stories have appeared in the Saturday Review, American Artist, and dozens of national and regional publications. Exhibits he has curated and organized have been in nearly 400 art museums, art centers and libraries across the country, including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. FARMING A STONY PLANET is a verse work derived from years of personal writings that recorded Epler's internal odyssey of discovery and development both as a human being and as an artist capable of great self-expression. It burst forth in its own voice with unique intellectual, cultural, and spiritual understanding as it travels through different levels of consciousness and moves back and forth through periods of time, places in space, and moments of raw feeling. It is heavily tinged with irony and humor. Like its author, this work is beyond categorization, beyond such need in both complex emotional content and innate technical ability. It provides the reader with a plethora of opportunities for mutual self-discovery, through its presentation of the bottomless depth and painful beauty of a self stripped bare to the bone. As a major fan of hers, I have personally witnessed the metamorphosis of Laura Epler both as a passionate human being and as a creative artist. This journey has encompassed great internal as well as external movement from Chicago to Kansas to Paris to Santa Fe to Taos to Aspen to Berkeley to Oakland and back to Santa Fe. And I can report to you in all honesty - as one who has observed many such personal evolutions over my sixty-plus years in an artistic family and fifteen-plus years as a biographer at Harvard and beyond - that hers is a nationally significant artistic development. - Owen de Long is a writer/commentator who is an expert in universal mass consciousness. Harvard '61, '65, '68. FARMING A STONY PLANET is a brave, honest, entertaining and provocative book, full of family, childhood memories, reflections on religion and the spirit, insight into the relationship of the individual to human society, cultural history, and what goes into the making of an artist. As the title of this long poetic philosophical memoir tells us, life ain't easy, but we reap the rewards of what we do with it. Laura Epler, an accomplished fine artist who works with mixed media, has turned to words to paint her life story. As anyone familiar with her art work would expect, the story is told in a non-linear fashion, with an assemblage of images that encompass childhood epiphanies of awareness, the learning process of becoming an artist, and the effects of traumatic news events. This is a book about the stubborn search for truth and self-awareness. Laura was raised in a half-Catholic home in the American middle west. Family was very important to her, and still informs her thinking and her art (at least her verbal art). From her ancestral family she has inherited a strong-willed nonconformity that keeps her true to herself and her art. The memories of her childhood confrontations are specific and arresting. In this verse memoir, Laura pays tribute to personal heroes and influences, people like Van Gogh, Mohammed Ali, and Bob Dylan. She acknowledges the traumatic effects of social tragedy, including the assassinations of M.L. King and the Kennedy brothers. But there is also much celebration of joy here, particularly the playful joy of creative spirituality. There is a psychedelic (almost kaleidoscopic) mix of memories and images that propels the story along. The structure of the book is solid and readable. The book is divided into nine parts (a good number) , and the parts are written for the most part in deceptively simple quatrains. You can read the book in a single sitting, at least the first time through. But you'll want to slow down as you read this book again and again. John Daniel, Publisher |
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