Art & Life with Emily LaCour

Today we’d like to introduce you to Emily LaCour.

Emily, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I was born in New Orleans and spent most of my life bouncing back and forth between Texas and Louisiana. Influenced by an occupational therapist mother and oil painting grandmother, I obsessively gravitated towards the visual and tactile as a child. I also have a twin, which granted me a mirroring point of view through which I experience the world and myself. The creative obsession continued through college where I received my BFA from LSU and my MFA from SMU in 2014. The chaotic ebbs and flows of my recent years have yielded the significant loss and mourning of a loved one and the joyful preparation to marry another. I currently live in Dallas where I have the privilege of teaching at a college and several local organizations. Common past times include scrubbing paint off my arms, couch, and floor.

Can you give our readers some background on your art?
As a twin, I have a lifelong fascination with paralleling bodies in stasis. This subjective perception has continued in my relationships and visual fascination with parallel states BETWEEN binaries such as merging/pulling apart, absence/ presence, symmetry/asymmetry, and figuration/abstraction. Handling something as elusive as memory, absence, and the psychic and physical space between two forms calls for a certain kind of visual variety, which in-turn, reflects my ever-changing painting style and relationship to these concepts. So for me, a painting is successful when the visual language of the paint handling expresses the content and concept. In my most recent series, tangled limbs suspended in opacities create knots that sometimes blur the boundaries between two forms. Often working from video stills that are both collected and performed, I engage the gesture of ritual, the gesture of the pictorial figure and my own actions in paint.

How do you think about success, as an artist, and what do quality do you feel is most helpful?
I really feel fortunate to do what I love, which subsequently pays the bills each month albeit just barely at times. Now in regards to my painting, a painting is “working” when its visual language matches the content. When I accept that each painting has a resolution and I show up daily to discover it, I feel like I am succeeding.

Currently I am a professor at a local college and when I am working with my students, as they bravely move through their own work, it reminds me to remain open throughout the entire process. I also feel successful when the “collaborative threads” so to speak, between my own work and the work of other makers, like in a group show, is powerfully evident. Seeing how it’s contextualized and seeing the way others are visually responding to similar questions is very exciting to me.

What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
You can find my work at:

Website: www.emilylacour.com
Instagram: @emevlac
Gallery Representation: Artspace 8 Gallery in Chicago https://www.artspace8.com/
Upcoming Group Show: Figuratively Speaking, Susan Eley Fine Art, NYC
Upcoming Permanent Collection: Maison de la Luz, New Orleans

Please don’t hesitate to say hello or direct any inquiries to me via e-mail: elacou4@gmail.com

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emilylacour.com
• Phone: 2817982012
• Email: elacou4@gmail.com
• Instagram: @emevlac

Image Credit:
Emily LaCour

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