Lorin Labardee

About the Process

As a former social studies teacher I'm drawn to the 1950's, the era of my childhood. My artist archetype is the trickster. The dark side of the Fifties have proved fertile ground. My work is a metaphor for the unseen and secret influences that impact children struggling to become healthy adults. I begin with borrowed imagery that evokes my own youth--cars with fins, flared skirts and anything else that references the unbridled consumerism that characterized buying habits in those years. Old issues of Popular Mechanics magazine and the Red Cross water safety handbook always inspire me. My current medium is mixed: collage often slathered over with layers of acrylic paint, sometimes a borrowed illustration is recreated in Japanese ink to complete my compositions. I'm also expert at making old school decals from graphic imagery scavenged from vintage ephemera The decals bring depth and added layers to my compositions The result is almost always colorful yet tinted with gently dark humor. Not exactly toast turned to carbon but definitely a joking tone of extra tan where the punchline frequently relies on ghouls, the Kennedy assassination or the joys of urological surgery. I love to juxtapose classic childhood illustrations from the Fifties with dental x-rays depicting periodontal disease. Ha, ha, ha. And then, sometimes, I just smear paint in quilted arrangements of broken color tiles. Fields of nine or 15 squares are ideal patchwork grids for blocking out paint along, without any imagery. I play with layering and texture and color free of narrative references. To me, it all adds up.