ART LIFE: Laura La Forêt Lengyel Laura La Forêt Lengyel is an American artist who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in 1946 and raised in the New England industrial town of Bridgeport, CT in the post war WWII environment by her educated middle class family whose roots have been traced back to 14th century Hungarian nobility. Her physician father had left Hungary in 1932 to avoid political upheaval and oppression, and established his medical practice and home office in an area known as doctors’ row. Hungarian was the primary language at home where displaced persons and former counts with violins gathered to reminisce about the “old country.” Her French Canadian maternal grandmother spoke French and half Hungarian mother spoke fluent French and Hungarian. Lengyel pursued her natural inclination to paint and make things as a young child in attic and basement workshops. Typical of the times, her talents were ignored in favor of academics and social development. Thanks to unique educational opportunities, she fast tracked herself through high school and graduated at age 16. Motivated to escape from her upbringing, she moved to California in 1963 to attend college, and found her calling in fine art on the edge of the west, far from the world’s emerging cultural center of New York. While discovering the vast and varied beauty, wildness and ruggedness of the West Coast, she explored everything that the San Francisco Bay Area offered. Originality, expression, commitment and purity of vision were the predominant creative and artistic modes. Aware of critical and societal leanings, she recognized the need to go her own way as an independent. Lengyel received a classical liberal arts education, studying painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, art history, aesthetics and philosophy, earning a BA in studio art from Mills College in CA in 1967. She was awarded a full work scholarship to the Aspen Artists and Writers school for the 1966 summer residency and completed her first commission for an oil painting of the Rolling Stones from a college classmate in 1965. Her art studies continued formally and in private studios (Stanford University, Academy of Art College San Francisco, California College of Arts and Crafts CCAC, San Francisco City College, College of the Redwoods). She credits her college professors and the collections and exhibits at the San Francisco Fine Art Museums and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA for her understanding of American, European, Greco-Roman and Asian art. During the era of social and political turbulence and urban flight, she retreated to the remote Victorian village of Mendocino on the Northern California coast like many of her contemporaries. She started painting as an urban artist working in a rural setting. Her first studio in 1968 was a sagging wooden garage with a dirt floor in the forest. She opened one of the first art galleries on the cliffs in town, and showcased regional artists and artisans. In 1972 she attended a crash course in bronze, aluminum and iron casting at Humboldt State University art foundry. With community contributions of labor and salvaged foundry parts, tin and bricks, she built a lost wax bronze foundry in an open-air shed in the “inner forest.” It was not until 1978 that she was able to enter the closed domain of sculpture after she was invited to serve as an apprentice in the full service sculpture studio of San Francisco master sculptor Spero Anargyros (1915-2004). She expanded her knowledge of sculpture techniques and opened her own studio in Marin, accepting painting and sculpture commissions for public and private sites, and providing fine art and design services. Over the last 45 years, Lengyel also experimented with alternate materials and explored a variety of creative strategies and styles. Her early influences were American and European modern masters, Impressionists, surrealists and expressionists. Lengyel’s work has been shown at the Triton Museum, Mills College Art Museum, M. Thacher Gallery of the University of San Francisco, Merced College, College of Marin, SOMARTS Cultural Center, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Falkirk Cultural Center, and Whitney Young Cultural Center, in addition to galleries and art venues. Her work is in private and corporate collections in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Ireland. Community Involvement & contributions: 1968-73 Gallery West community fine arts programs, art films, music and modern dance. Co-founder of Fairfax Fine Art League, 1980. Mills College Alumnae Club of Marin President, 1978 - 1990. California Society of Printmakers board member 1997-2004 as Exhibit Director, Vice President, President, organizing printmaking shows in colleges, universities and museums and writing for CSP publications. National Poetry Association board member 1995-97. Teaching: drawing and etching to children and adults; sculpture technique workshops 1979-2009. Founder of The Breast Project: An Artist comments on an American Obsession, 1995; Produced and starred in 19 unique painting performance works 1995-2001; Demonstrations & workshops: 2004 monotype demonstration at CFA Gallery, San Anselmo, the Painterly Print Exhibit; Life printing workshop for survivors of Breast Cancer Action Network 2006. 2008 – present: Recent paintings, sculpture, original prints 2000’s Dreams, Visions, Realities 2000’s Metals & Elements: iron, acid, alkaline 1995 - 2001: Pressed 1984 - 94 Sculpture: Bronze, cast stone and mixed material; mixed media paintings & collages. 1979 - 84 Figurative sculpture, paintings, works on paper, portraits. 1964-78 Expressionist paintings, sculpture, drawings from the San Francisco Bay Area & Mendocino, CA. |
1998 SOMA studio
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