SELECTED BIOGRAPHY
EXHIBITIONS
LOS ANGELES MUNICIPAL ART GALLERY • PASADENA MUSEUM OF HISTORY • LATINO ART MUSEUM • HAMA • ART TRIP TYCH • GRAFFEO'S • MENDOCINO ART CENTER • PRINTED MATTER - M.F.A. SHOW, MEDIA CENTER, UCSD • HOLTER MUSEUM OF ART • SAN DIEGO ART INSTITUTE 41st INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION • PORTRAITS (Curated by Molly Barnes) • ABOUT FACE • BARNSDALL ART CENTER • DOCTORS, LAWYERS, INDIAN CHIEFS (TIRAGE ART GALLERY) • WITHIN THE WALLS (TIRAGE ART GALLERY) • TAKE A SEAT (Universal Studios Executive Dining Room) • DRAWINGS - LOS ANGELES HARBOR COLLEGE GALLERY • DEPAYSER at ARTSPACE GALLERY • THE SECOND ANNUAL MINIPRINT EXHIBITION, JUNIPER GALLERY / NAPA ART CENTER • NORTH CAROLINA 10Th ANNUAL U.S. PRINT AND DRAWING EXHIBITION - GREENVILLE MUSEUM OF ART, NOAH STUDIOS AND CENTER / CALLERY CARRBORO (Juried by Eric Fischi) • KANSAS TWELFTH NATIONAL SMALL PAINTING,DRAWING AND PRINT EXHIBITION, FORT HAYS STATE UNIVERSITY (Juried by David Finkbeiner) • ARTIST'S BOOKS, U.S.A, TRAVELING EXHIBITION SINCE 1977 (Curated by Peter Frank) • WOMEN'S SHOW, COMMUNITY ARTS GALLERY SAN DIEGO
ARTICLES WRITTEN
1993 "Six Los Angeles Muralists at the Koplin Gallery", VISIONS, Art Quarterly; Fall issue
"Guy Dill at Turner/Krull", VISIONS, Art Quarterly, Spring Issue 1992
"The Burdensome White Man", review of Dominique Blain and Lawrence Gipe, VISIONS, Art Quarterly; Spring 1991
"Reinhard Voight at ANGLES", VISIONS, Art Quarterly, June Issue 1990
"Up-Close and Personal", review of Ilene Segalove's retrospective, VISIONS, Art Quarterly, December Issue
EDUCATION
1978 Master of Fine Arts - University of California San Diego, La Jolla
1976/77 Regents Fellowship - University of California San Diego, La Jolla
1975 Bachelor of Arts - University of California San Diego, La Jolla
COLLECTIONS
Available upon request
Like old photographs, old memories can fade; they are more likely to stay fast in form but stay in color, in texture, in the feel of the space, the charge of the emotional atmosphere. LARAINE MESTMAN'S paintings based on family Polaroids replicate these effects of memory. They capture not times and people past, but the way we in the present recall those times and people: vivid but soft-edged, strangely familiar, full of detail in detailless fields. We all have scrapbooks like Mestman's -- and were we asked to reconstruct them without looking at them, they would look much like this.
- Peter Frank, Art Critic, Curator and Poet.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The walls of my childhood home were lined with cheap framed prints of paintings by Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir, and Van Eyck. Running down the hallway, passing the faces of men and women from other centuries, served to fuel my young mind to imagine their lives and influence my future endeavors.
My love of people, pets, and their portraits remained steadfast, encouraged by a prize at the age of 8, for a pastel portrait of a clown. In my case, portraits serve as a net to capture the personality of a subject, the context and time of the painting, and a barometer of my receptiveness toward the subject.
The medium for my work is acrylic and/or oil on canvas, paper, or wood. I work from a sitting or old photos, black and white or color.
The portrait makes a strong statement of the subject in the period of history that it is painted. There is a story and the portrait is just the beginning.