Generation: The Roots of Making in the Asawa-Lanier Family

“As a child I had many visions that I could not express. As an adult I still have them and sometimes I am able to give them form, in a drawing on paper or in space, in a transparency, in defined volumes and the voids between them or the shape of a work’s shadow. I try to explore the total capacity of materials and techniques and often that takes me where I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.” 

 

— Ruth Asawa

(March 29, 2002)

 

“When I grew up in the South, a career in art was not a suitable profession …I think it (architecture) was that you could do everything that you could do, say, in sculpture. But it had a use. I aspired to build beautiful buildings.”

 

- Albert Lanier

(The Bancroft Library Oral History Center, 1974)

“I make art because the process challenges me and gives me times of great joy and surprise. I like the magic of making something from nothing. As a teaching artist, art making promotes collaboration, social interaction, flexibility, improvisation, invention, experimentation, problem-solving and a safe way to fail and succeed."

 

- Aiko Lanier Cuneo

"The artists who have had the greatest influence on my work are teaching artists like Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, William T. Williams and David Lee Brown. 

 

My love of color and pattern in two and three-dimension can be seen in my work with paper, paint and fabric. Repurposed paper and paint chips from SCRAP SF provide endless ways to experiment with collage and dimensional constructions. I use scissors, paper cutters, scoring tools and Exacto knives to hand cut my shapes. Translating collage into paint and sewn fabric gives me alternate ways to explore color and pattern.” 

"When I first saw the minimalist grids and stripe paintings of Agnes Martin, I barely noticed them despite their prominent display all together in one impressive room. Years later when I saw scores of her works together at her retrospective [...], I began to understand her aesthetic of perfectly painted stripes and grid patterns, some large and some small works on paper done in series.

 

I watched a video of her speaking of her life and painting philosophy of always painting above the line - never below, and living one’s life always above the line in creativity, love and positive energy, never going below the line into areas of negative energy."

  

- Paul Lanier

"My early paintings were RSP: randomly smeared paint. This limitation allowed me to begin to understand the complexity of color, proportion and seemingly nonrepresentational shapes and the feelings these shapes bring to the viewer. When I look back at my old paintings I see why Martin destroyed her early paintings, maybe she had moved on and could no longer see anything worth looking at in her previous aesthetic experiments. Rather than destroying my old paintings I will someday try to just fix them, so they are “not so bad”.

 

- Paul Lanier

"I start with an idea or image and map it out with colors and shapes and lines. I explore something interesting or sentimental to me and recreate it by breaking it down to its simplest form. Individual units are pieces of a story and the colors and patterns I use become my alphabet. The end result is a design inspired by everyday life."

 

- Lilli Lanier