Food Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

This is one of my studio paintings. I love watercolor because it’s a very challenging medium. I used Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolors with world-class acid-free Arches 300gsm wa...

Still life of a can of beef stew. Watercolor on Arches cold pressed 140 lb watercolor paper. :: Painting :: Pop-Art :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity s...

I painted this jar of pickles live during my livestreaming show Let's Paint TV. :: Painting :: Impressionist :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity signed ...

Still life of a can of whole black olives. Painted on a full sheet ( 30" x 22 1/4") Arches 140 cold press watercolor paper. Please note: there are a few splashes of watercolor above ...

Still life of an old can of coffee. Watercolor on Arches cold pressed 140 lb watercolor paper. :: Painting :: Pop-Art :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity...

Still life of a bag of peanuts. Watercolor on Arches cold pressed 140 lb watercolor paper. :: Painting :: Pop-Art :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity sig...

Still life of a can of beef stew. Watercolor on Arches cold pressed 140 lb watercolor paper. :: Painting :: Pop-Art :: This piece comes with an official certificate of authenticity s...

Cherry Dancer Marcel Vertes French, 1895-1961 Beautiful girl juggling cherries is a beautiful and charming idea that is deftly rendered in a quick and loose style. Work is round De...

artwork dimensions (unframed): 15h x 20w inches LAURA TANNER GRAHAM’s drawings and installations are often discussed as part of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, sharing similar themes with authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. As a Georgia native, Graham’s work seeks to understand the ways in which pattern and printed textiles are informed by social and political movements. Her narratives are tightly bound to antebellum traditions while balancing the changing ideals of the new generation of southern society. Graham received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA from Florida State University. She has exhibited nationally in both group and solo exhibitions including the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art. She has also been a visiting artist at Tulane University and Valdosta State University. In 2016, Graham was awarded a fellowship and residency at the Ucross Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Graham is currently living and making work in Tucson, AZ. STATEMENT Firmly grounded in America’s expansive colonial history, my work interrogates how Southern culture has been idealized as “quintessential America” and the bedrock of traditional American values. Using my familiarity and position within Southern culture, I have created a new visual literacy to demonstrate how America’s nostalgia for tradition has been manipulated in an effort to isolate and disenfranchise. My drawings act as a visual archive of research that examines the consequences of American colonialism and addresses the sense of white fragility that continues to pervade Western culture. In the midst of widespread anxiety over the collective American identity, there has been a revival of many of the country’s unresolved historical battles, including contentious race relations, sexism, nativism, and an ever-growing wage gap. I employ the Americana aesthetic of the old South to parallel historical and contemporary acts of resistance to racial, economic, and gender diversity. Borrowing directly from the decorative arts, the meticulously hand-cut mylar and equally intricate drawing capitalizes on America’s propensity for nostalgia to lure the viewer into confronting injustices through the detached lens of that which has already happened. Through a combination of appropriated and invented imagery, my work contextually constructs contemporary accounts of systemic marginalization, executed under the guise of leisure, embellishment and luxury. The dense visual language invites investigation into the textured surfaces and leads the viewer to reflect on the social textures of contemporary culture while questioning their own complicity in current social constructs. Sourcing from period- specific textiles, turn-of-the-century advertisements, campaign posters, and found family photographs, the collaged images create a singular narrative composition that document the cyclical and systemic nature of marginalization in America. The methodology with which the drawings are constructed echoes historical layers of rules, regulations and hierarchies that are stitched into dominant white American myths. The resulting drawings are indexical in nature, recording the parallels between topics of current debate and 18th century Western expansionism. The disconnect between the delicate nature of the work and the unresolved cultural tensions that it reveals provides a visual record of the inconsistencies of American idealism. My current project explores the South as the embodiment of America’s pastoral traditions and values that are at the center of the “Make America Great Again” movement, a movement which has both exploited and is at odds with a social ideal that simultaneously proclaims itself to be “post- racial” and “post- gender” while identifying with a “pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps” mentality. As one of the earliest colonized areas, the South is often portrayed as a region of racial and gender stability in the face of impending change. I am currently working with research institutions in the South to further understand how the architectural structure of the Southern plantation...

Colored drawing on a botanical subject by Laura Fantini. Laura Fantini is an Italian artist living in New York, known for her hyper-realistic minimalist colored pencil still life d...

Sz: 14 1/2"H x 23"W Alexander Warren Montel (1921-2002) Fashion illustrator for House of Lanvin Paris in the 1950s featured in Harper's Bazaar Yellow Circles

Plot Plan No. 170519 Full-Dress Protectionist Pad With Knotted Entrance Strategy This ink and watercolor, work on paper is from Patricia Smith's newly released series: "Shelter in P...

Cathy Ross creates meticulous and extraordinary still-life paintings in watercolor on Arches paper

Cathy Ross creates meticulous and extraordinary still-life paintings in watercolor on Arches paper

Colored pencil on paper

watercolor on paper

watercolor on paper

Collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen