Dry Wit

LoPresti’s oil paintings and watercolors include epic views of gigantic nuclear test sites and the scarred desert landscapes of the American west, counterbalanced by intimate depictions of cacti and desert flowers, symbols of ecology and resilience. The pairing invokes a yin-yang of beauty and destruction, trauma and aesthetics.
LoPresti grew up near the Hanford site, where the US manufactured plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb. This personal history imbues his artworks with a nuanced perspective on blistered landscapes. Avoiding overt politicization, LoPresti’s work focuses instead on observed reality filtered through the eyes of a landscape painter. LoPresti is also a practitioner of aikido, a Japanese martial art founded in the ashes of WWII Japan. Aikido espouses a martial philosophy of non-confrontation, an appropriate strategy for facing all-powerful weapons to which there is no real defense.
https://uam.nmsu.edu/eric-loprestisuperbloom/
LoPresti holds a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is currently working on Center-Surround, a multi-channel video partially funded by a grant via the Carnegie Corporation, to be shown in 2020 at Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan.
LoPresti lives in Brooklyn and practices aikido at the New York Aikikai
http://www.ericlopresti.com/about