Laura Schiff Bean

Biography

Laura Schiff Bean grew up on Long Island, NY where music, dance and creative pursuits were an integral part of everyday life. Visiting museums and galleries and attending theatre in New York City were a routine part of family weekends. As a child she studied flute and ballet but was always happiest working with her hands, drawing, painting or building.

While earning her BA in Psychology at George Washington University in Washington DC, she also attended classes at the Corcoran School of Art. In 1991 she enrolled formally at the School of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and attended through 1997. It was here that she began to incorporate her interest in human nature with her art. Ideas of memory, dreams, subconscious thought and physical presence all permeate her work.

Bean is best known for her dress “portraits” painted with many layers of thick dripping paint. Splashes, drips and brushed slashes of white bring this apparitional gown to life on a midnight background. For me, this ball gown was a feminine counterpoint to the freestanding bathrobes usually posed by Jim Dine as “Pop” art dawned in the 1960s. Bean’s gown has an imaginative force and elusive presence all its own: it creates a decorative and decorous ruckus with exquisite drawing and a concert of memories." —Artscope Magazine, August 2008

Artist Statement

The empty coats and dresses of my recent work reflect on identity as both journey and construct, accumulated and fabricated from the critical moments and turning points that indelibly mark our lives. Clothing simultaneously transforms and disguises, exposes and hides. My paintings represent the subconscious in the act of transporting the past into present and future imagination. The circles, lights and butterflies in my work speak to the subconscious vs. the more tangible, corporeal qualities of the dress.

My work is figurative, yet abstract in the sense that I see the surface as a skin, its drips, blotches, scratches and slashes, suggesting the gradual accumulation of events and their corresponding traces. For me, the sense of accumulation and construction in the surface of the work creates an intriguing tension with the sense of a single captured moment - frozen, blurred, and imbued with emotional force.

The recent inclusion of text and graffiti in my work references our universal desire to tangibly show our presence, to make our selves heard and to leave our mark. Whether thinking of the human presence as the elusive interior world of the subconscious or the more material, gritty and visible text of graffiti, in the end I view my work as successful, if my paintings can make the viewer feel just a little bit naked.