Leeza Doreian

Austin artist Lisa Doreian’s work combined painted renderings of textile patterns from such diverse origins as William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement, Italian Renaissance motifs, and from Art Nouveau patterns. She wove together these diverse patterns into compositionally complex paintings on laminated wood.

Doreian constructed spaces in which shifting foregrounds and backgrounds created an undulating play of receding, flat, and foreshortened spaces. Through this play of patterns and spaces, Doreian created a surrealistic world of her own. Her smaller still-lifes presented lushly rendered compositions of insects, flowers, and fabric and are often painted on circular discs of laminated wood. Doreian built up her laminated support to an unusual thickness of 4 – 8 inches which allowed her work to take on a dramatic sculptural presence along with the illusionistically painted picture plane which she constructed on its final surface.

The imagery of Doreian’s paintings referenced more than just the relationship between styles of painting and textile design. Autobiographical narratives began to emerge through the web of patterns and spaces which Doreian spun for us with as much detail as the insects which she sometimes chooses as her subject. Wedding cakes, private rooms, dresses worn by the artist, and allusions to Emily Dickinson poems emerged out of the web of pattern to leave the viewer with an unusual view into Doreian’s private, imaginal world.