Artist Statement

Throughout my life I have sought ways to integrate my three main interests: art, music, and science. Growing up I studied voice and piano. As a psychiatrist I drew with my young patients to help them explore their thoughts and feelings without prejudgment. While in graduate school I approached painting scientifically studying materials and methods, perspective, anatomy, and botany. In time, color and texture took on more prominence whether a piece was realistic or abstract. At first, I ascribed this development to a search for “psychological realism,” along the lines of expressionism. Then I looked at my palette whose colors were arranged in increments like scales on a piano. Color harmonies were eerily similar to chords, dissonances, and counterpoints. My insistence on creating increasingly dimensional texture gave the paintings pulse, rhythm, and energy. Here was the missing element. Color and texture were expressions of my love of music.

Bio

Louise Sennesh began her professional life as a physician specializing in Psychiatry. She retired in 1988 from the practice of medicine to embark on a career in art which had always been a part of her life. She first studied under her mother, Freda Reiter, a nationally recognized courtroom artist for ABC Television. Even in medical school she supplemented her studies with detailed anatomical drawings. In her psychiatric practice she frequently used drawing as a therapeutic tool with children.

Eventually she recognized the need to devote herself to art in order to understand it more deeply. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from George Washington University in 1997. She won two awards for drawing, one of which was the Alfred N. Alfandre Purchase Prize.

After graduate school she worked as a portraitist taking on a number of private commissions. Unfortunately, it was the rare patron who was willing to risk experimentation with texture and challenging color. She gravitated more and more to subjects that would allow her this freedom. Lately she has returned to the figure but is experimenting with using it as a basis for abstract forms.

Always fascinated by science she continues exploring anatomy and botany on her own. She frequently uses these preliminary studies for her more abstract fine art. She works in a wide variety of media including acrylic, gouache, watercolor, colored pencil, graphite, and pen and ink. She is an avid gardener and one of her painted gardens has hung in the American Embassy in San Salvador.

Although she works in a wide variety of media she is currently experimenting with acrylic paint on highly textured canvases and paper. This technique intensifies and enriches a piece's color by allowing underlying layers to peek through to the surface. In addition, texture creates rhythm and energy in the work. Her paintings have been seen in a number of galleries located in Virginia, New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey.