Lane Twitchell is an incredibly accomplished contemporary visual artist with a long list of awards, exhibitions, and public and private commissions. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and received an MFA from the same. He is well versed in oils, acrylics, enamels, and urethanes and produced a portfolio of museum quality paintings over the course of his career. However, he is perhaps most known for his cut paper and acrylic polymers on plexi panel.
Cherie K. Woodworth wrote, “What Twitchell does is reinterpret the Western landscape— landscape as kaleidoscope, as a quilt made of paper, as a wide open world refracted in a giant, man-made snowflake. It is the landscape and the heart of the West—its natural grandeur, its history, its modern-day suburbs. Twitchell’s landscape is a labyrinthine desert rose blossoming in the midst of Manhattan.”
When I first approached Twitchell late last year for a profile I was told, politely, to get lost. When the website was up and running I reached out again and he graciously agreed to a profile. Part of his resistance stems from his mixed feelings about the Mormon church. Twitchell was born and raised in Utah in a Mormon home, but has since left the church with legion of opinions and feelings about his Mormon heritage, the Church, and the relationship between art and the Church. Twitchell is talented and opinionated and outspoken with a long list of articles and blog posts online. We plan to look again at his art in the coming months.
Images courtesy Lane Twitchell (including a picture of a young Twitchell seated at Ezra Taft Benson’s desk).
Visit Lane Twitchell’s website.
