Laurie Schirmer Carpenter

www.laurieschirmercarpenter.com                         
Laurie Schirmer Carpenter grew up in northwestern Illinois and graduated from LorettoHeightsCollege in Denver, Colorado with a degree in English Literature in 1967.   She returned to school at the University of Colorado, Denver to study art, graduating With Distinction with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a BA in Art History in 1988.  She has been painting full time since then.  Her paintings are found in many corporate and private collections nationwide.  When her husband was transferred to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1990 she became reacquainted with her Midwestern roots and developed an interest in the landscape, especially the skies, which are often depicted in her paintings.  Moving to northwestern Indiana in 2006, she continues to paint the land and skies of the Midwest.     

                        Carpenter’s intent is to depict the ephemeral quality of the atmosphere while maintaining the sense of the earths solidity, resulting in a perception of the vastness, beauty and quiet in the landscape.  She has been influenced by the 19th century German Romanticist, Caspar David Friedrich, and by the Luminist Painters of the Hudson RiverSchool.  Their ability to convey the universality and timeless quality of the land, while giving the impression of a particular place at a particular point in time, inspires her.

                        She is concerned with being true to the spirit of the place while creating her own personal vision of it.  Her oil paintings are a chronicle of the land as she sees it but they are also visual ideas of the land.  Capturing in color and form that which cannot be captured in language is demanding and soul searching (it is called a work of art, after all).  Painting, for her, begins with seeing and ends with seeing better.  It is seeing not only what is before her but what is within her.