Laurie Lee Brom Paints Beautifully Dreary Window Portraits
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 53, which is sold out. Get our latest issue with a new subscription here.
Last June, Laurie Lee Brom unveiled four new paintings at Roq La Rue that each look like scenes from a movie. The woman at the center of all four images is smoking behind a rain-splattered windowpane, a few details of suburbia reflecting in the glass. The gloom of a stormy night contrasts with the woman’s clothing—a slip-like apricot nightgown and caplet in two paintings, and another bright, floral sheath dress in two others—that drops us in on moments set somewhere between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her expression and posture change slightly in the four paintings, but there remains a sense of mystery. Is she angry? Is she frightened? Is this the start of a horror flick or the climax of a drama?
The oil-on-linen paintings—”Reflecting,” “Return,” “Closer” and “Apricot,” respectively—came about as part of The Visions of Graces, a three-artist exhibition that brought together Brom with Kari-Lise Alexander and Syd Bee. Brom refers to the trio as part of a “small girl gang” of Seattle-based artists. “It was really inspiring to be working with them because I just love them to death and they’re super talented people,” she says by phone from her home. “I think that we each tried to turn in our best stuff. It was a really successful show.”
And, for Brom, it was an opportunity to steer towards a new direction in her work. Brom is known for painting women and, quite frequently, she delves into vintage aesthetics and eerie scenes. With her latest works, though, she has deliberately stepped into a specific period of time, one that corresponds with her own childhood. “I was really interested in the backstory of women in that era and their place in the world and the house and their environments,” she explains.
She says that others have connected with the era as well. “I actually had several people say, oh my god, that’s my mom! “
Brom notes that she previously had painted portraits of women standing at windows—notably in her nod to Wuthering Heights in “Cathy’s Ghost at Heathcliff’s Window.” These paintings draw from Victorian and Edwardian imagery. “I felt like I had explored that, and that was more expected of me,” she says.
In the midst of a long photo session with art model Olive Glass, Brom noticed the floral dress through a window, laying on a pool table. “That bright, psychedelic thing was just screaming at me,” she says. The reference photos came at the end of the day, just “one more thing” that she wanted to try out with the model. “Immediately, it seemed to work somehow,” she says. “Between Olive being very natural and knowing what I’m trying to do and me having a really clear vision in my head that just hit me.”
She spent about four months painting these images. “What I love is attacking a painting as a puzzle,” she says. “I generally start without a drawing underneath and I just start painting. To me painting is most interesting that way.”
Brom continues, “We all have our own processes, but for me it keeps my mind stimulated to look at it as puzzle pieces. So, a lot of the time, things get super abstract to me as I’m painting them.”
That process lent itself to effects like the rain against the window. “The crazy visual effect that you can get there with the rain and the psychedelic patterns really excited me,” she says. “I loved figuring out that puzzle of how to make the rain work.”
What I love is attacking a painting as a puzzle.”
Brom sees less of a portraiture aspect in these paintings. “I’m trying to create a portrait of a person without their face, which is really interesting to me,” she says. Instead, she allows the setting and actions to shed light on who this person is. (“They’re smoking, like everybody’s parents’ did in the ’70s and ’60s,” she notes.)
She studied illustration at Parsons and surmises that this background lends itself to her interest in narrative painting. The irony, though, is that Brom studied illustration to learn how to paint. “In my day, there was nobody teaching how to paint realism,” she explains. “You went to the illustration program. I think that probably shows in my work still.”
Response to the paintings has been stellar. “They all sold and have new homes, which is wonderful,” says Brom. “More than that, I think that, talking with people, I got really positive feedback from this particular group of paintings. That was awesome.” And it’s a good sign for Brom, who plans to continue with this series. “I’ve cleared the schedule and want to keep painting in this vein and explore it and see where it takes me,” she says. “I’m not sure if it will be a full-blown solo show, but it will be a body of work, a continuation of this one.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 53, which is sold out. Get our latest issue with a new subscription here.
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