Featured Artist: Laurelin Gilmore
“SPOTLIGHT”
Gallery 2110, 1023 Del Paso Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95815
2nd Saturday Art Walk: September 12th, 6–9 PM
Laurelin Gilmore, a life long artist, explores realism, fantasy, and surrealism through her paintings. Painting the human form has always been her touchstone.
She realized quickly that painting people with hooves; wings, scales and horns were expressions of her own experience. As a woman of blended ethnicities, a person born on a cusp, and living with the skin condition Vitiligo, duality and the place where opposites meet has always intrigued her. Fence sitters, go-betweens, and people with a foot in two different worlds captivate her imagination.
This has been a way for Gilmore to move the conversation about Vitiligo to the forefront and has created a series of works that look very plainly at the reality of Vitiligo without the mask of a metaphor.
Vitiligo is a skin condition that shows up as patches of colorless skin. It is not contagious or physically painful, and in many cases is very beautiful. It can, however, be extremely emotionally traumatic for the bearer, and socially ostracizing. When she was nine she first noticed the appearance of white spots on her skin. As in many other people’s experience, it spread in fits and starts over the course of her life. The patterns of the patches are usually symmetrical, sometimes creating Rorschach-like designs in the skin. In the absence of a cure, some of those with the condition have chosen to embrace it as a fact of life.
While everyone with Vitiligo is, naturally, at a different stage of acceptance, denial, or fighting for a cure, Gilmore was fortunate to meet several women who were willing to explore the condition’s inherent beauty. Being a lifelong artist, she looked for Vitiligo in art and surprisingly, found very little. So she took it upon herself to create pieces of art that explore some aspects of the experience of people living with Vitiligo, and the places in nature where kindred patterns are found. It is Laurelin Gilmore’s hope the viewer sees some part of their own experience in these paintings whether or not they share the condition, and that they leave with some new ideas about beauty.
