Beautiful Swiimers Art Exhibition

Visual Artist Laurie McIntosh will open a new showing of work called “Beautiful Swimmers” at Columbia’s Stormwater Studios, 413 Pendleton Street, February 27 through March 8, 2020 with an opening reception on February 28 from 5 – 8 pm. “Beautiful Swimmers” is a collection of more than a dozen, mostly large-format, oil paintings in addition to a brilliant display of papier mâché life from the sea.

Formerly of Vista Studios/Gallery 80808 from 2010 until 2016, McIntosh founded Northlight Studio in Camden, SC in 2016 where she currently works and paints. McIntosh is a SC native who earned a BA in Fine Art from the University of SC in 1982 and went on to train at the Center for Creative Imaging, Penland School of Crafts, and more. Previous noteworthy exhibitions include “All the In-Between: My Story of Agnes,” which served as the inspiration for an annotated art book written by the artist in 2012, the SC State Museum 30th Anniversary Juried Exhibition in 2019, and a number of juried and invitational solo and group shows throughout SC. In 2019 McIntosh was commissioned to create public art for the “Art Bus” for Comet Public Transportation, also in Columbia, and, in 2018, she exhibited a solo show, “Environmental and Poetic Abstractions” at the Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County.

An aquaphile by nature, the artist’s concept for the exhibition “Beautiful Swimmers” came from her passion for weightlessness and the freedom from physical and mental burden it implies. “My mom made me take synchronized swimming when I was a kid in Greenville, SC,” McIntosh says, and images of the art form appear in this collection. Recognizable figures from her 2012 series All the In Between also reappear. “Upon the winding down of my last series, ‘Environmental Abstractions,’ she continues, “I had a strong desire to simplify my images, introduce more pattern and invent more space within the painting. In the process of sketching and pushing these ideas around, figures, pattern, and open spaces began to make the images feel very light and weightless and my swimmers began to immerge.”

McIntosh’s “Beautiful Swimmers” offers the viewer a world of two-legged, four-legged and no-legged creatures expressed through an assortment of art mediums, inviting the viewer to suspend gravity and dive into an art setting where their terrestrial troubles will temporarily float away.

For more information on artist Laurie McIntosh please visit her website at lauriemcintoshart.com and to learn more about Stormwater Studios visit stormwaterstudios.org