Painting and Perception with Artist Lina Tharsing
With a portfolio consisting primarily of painted works, Kentucky-based artist Lina Tharsing demonstrates a propensity for creating dreamy compositions that exist somewhere in-between realism and surrealism.
Taking inspiration from sources including antique books, anatomical drawings, botanical illustrations and Life magazines from the 40s and 50s, Lina’s works engage with a variety of themes and ideas including nature, the loss of it, and the intersection between imagination and reality.
Exemplifying her ability to decontextualize and reconstruct situations in her work, the artist’s recent series Making a New Forest is based on a collection of old photographs depicting the construction of displays and dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History; going beyond the immediate suggestions of reconstruction of a destroyed environment that the paintings connote, Lina’s works also address the complexities of perception, inviting the viewer to look through a window onto other worlds and landscapes, across place and time, and to find their own truths:
“My paintings, like the dioramas that inspired them, manipulate our perception of reality and force us to question our own place within the confines of time and space.”
Also remarkable are some of the artist’s early mixed media works, such as the visually engaging series Collages compiled out of old polaroid photographs; the series Walgreens Film Camera demonstrates Lina’s ability to capture moments in time, the images containing much more than what is visible at first glance, alive with unknown possibilities that speak to each viewer individually.
Named a superstar of Southern art by Oxford American in 2012, Tharsing’s work has been shown widely across the South-Eastern United States; she continues to live and work in Kentucky, with some of her recent work including collaboration with the Lexington Art League community supported art project.
Named a superstar of Southern art by Oxford American in 2012, Tharsing’s work has been shown widely across the South-Eastern United States; she continues to live and work in Kentucky, with some of her recent work including collaboration with the Lexington Art League community supported art project.
