Steffanie Lorig has explored many different aspects of the creative arts—from collage to writing children’s books to designing brands to illustrating business concepts.
In the late 90’s, she parlayed her love of kids, Outsider Art, and book design into a nonprofit based on the idea that creative expression could be used to heal children who had faced difficulty and adversity at too young of an age. She engaged therapists from around the country to create workbooks, programs, and trainings to teach adults how to use creativity to open channels of communication and understanding that trauma had closed.
She ran the organization for two decades and helped over 155,000 children and teens around the world through the programs, books, and trainings she created, and as she was watching for the next chapter in her career, she attended a painting workshop with Jesse Reno, an Outside Artist she admired. The class released years of blocked inspiration, giving way to an obsessive need to paint, yielding over 600 works, including art journals that subverted castaway library books into artistic explorations.
Besides being a prolific painter, she is the author of eleven books and a workshop facilitator that believes in the power of art to heal. She is also a graphic design manager at a well-respected international consulting firm working to help businesses create more sustainable and equitable practices. She is based in Seattle, Washington.
See her entire body of work at http://instagram.com/steffanielorig.
Statement
I have painted on and off throughout my life, beginning in college with a painting prerequisite class where we learned how to mix paint and dabble in realism, which I found limiting and invalidating. My interest turned towards the refreshing honesty of idiosyncratic artmakers such as outsider artists whose flexibility allowed them to use whatever material was at hand to explore and express feelings, personal history, and worldviews.
My paintings are a combination of many mediums, including collage. As I create, I enjoy the sense of motion and the feel of paint between my fingers, often using sticks, feathers, or old kitchen instruments to create harmonies on the canvas. The work is oftentimes deconstructed and reassembled, giving way to random synchronicities that become a tactile reminder of my own life path and journey.
I see my paintings as energetic adventures that operate on both a conscious and unconscious level;. Others have described my work as “visual poetry dancing in complex layers of color, texture, and patterns.”
My folkloric subjects are visually ambidextrous – shape-shifting faces within faces within figures within color fields – painting the ideas of fantastical flesh, form, or fauna, but avoiding typical refined, expected figures, operating hand in hand with my imagination to bring the invisible to life.
All images copyright © Steffanie Lorig 2023.