Biography:

Born in  Gary, Indiana, Gina Litherland has been active in the visual arts since the mid 1970s, exploring photography, performance, drawing and painting.  She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her paintings, drawings, and articles have been published worldwide in journals and periodicals.  Her essay on the connections between creative activity and the natural world, “Imagination & Wilderness,” appears in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (University of Texas Press).  Litherland’s work has been the subject of a museum exhibitions at the James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in Madison, the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee in 2007, and several solo exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago, most recently in 2013.

On Painting

I have always been interested in the interplay between myth, the natural world, and the domain of dreams and memory. As a child, I spent many hours exploring natural wooded areas and empty lots inhabited by multitudes of insects and wildlife. This, along with a fervent interest in reading, particularly fairy tales, laid the foundation for my current investigations as an artist. Much of my work is inspired by folklore, myth, and literature reflected in my own personal preoccupations, specifically themes of desire, femaleness, the natural world, the human/animal boundary, children's games, ritual, intuition, and memory. The painting techniques that I use, traditional indirect oil painting techniques similar to those used by fifteenth century Sienese painters, combined with textural effects created by using various tools other than the paint brush, allow me to create a detailed, layered, and complex surface of images recreating the experience of looking at the forest floor with its rich blanket of diverse matter in various stages of decay. Suddenly, an object emerges and comes sharply into focus.

While some of my paintings begin with an idea that I have been ruminating over for some time, or are inspired by a particularly compelling book or folktale, others occur quite spontaneously, beginning with a decalcomania underpainting which suggests forms that emerge and develop into a personal narrative. The act of painting becomes a complete process of revelation. A mysterious narrative emerges, Rorschach-like, from a turbulent, chaotic ground of color and texture. Myths, dreams, memories, and phantoms of pigment suspended in medium are in continuous dialogue with one another. Dormant images ignite slowly, as our eyes adjust to their dark submerged brilliance.

-  Gina Litherland, 2013