Steffanie Lorig has explored many different aspects of the creative arts—from collage and writing children’s books to designing brands and illustrating business concepts.
In the late 90’s, she parlayed her love of kids, art, and book design into a starting a nonprofit based on the idea that creative expression could heal children who faced overwhelming adversity such as homelessness, cancer, and community violence. She worked with therapists from around the country to create workbooks, programs, and trainings to teach therapists and counselors 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. In 1995, as she considered her next chapter, she signed up for a painting workshop in Mexico with an Outside Artist that she admired. The workshop transformed her personal practice, giving way to an obsessive need to paint. She has created almost 700 works since then, including subverting castaway library books into artistic explorations and journals.
She is employed full time as an Associate Creative Director at an international consulting firm and paints in her spare time. Besides being a prolific painter, she has also authored eleven books and has has facilitated many creative workshops that center around the power of art to give voice to unspoken needs. She is based in Seattle, Washington. http://instagram.com/steffanilorig.
Statement
I have always seen faces in random things (the official word for this is “pareidolia” which sounds more like a disease than a blessing), but it’s something I’ve enjoyed all my life—I see sleeping giants in rock formations; a wink in the folds of a crumpled up towel; a cat in spilled tea.
In my art, I take this inclination a step further, deliberately creating textured chaos, then making correlations and coaxing out whimsical and dreamlike forms and figures. To eliminate control and increase happy accidents, I often use found objects to apply or remove the paint and then shape what appears into meaning. The resulting folkloric subjects are often ambidextrous—featuring faces within faces within figures.
By taking generous creative liberties and playing with logic-defying juxtapositions, I explore the relationship between chance and order. In an intersection between modern expressionism, outsider art, and surrealism, the final paintings are multi-layered, embracing the unexpected and unpredictable, challenging the viewer to seek out their personal interpretation.
All images copyright © Steffanie Lorig 2025.