LANNY DEVUONO received her M.F.A. in painting from Mills College (Oakland, CA) in 1986, and a Master of Arts Degree from Columbia University Teachers College in 1993. In addition, she earned a B.A. in Art from Antioch University in 1980 and pursued graduate studies in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984-85.
DEVUONO is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. In 2004, she was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the College of Fine Arts in Thirvanathapuram, Kerala, India.
Over the years DEVUONO has worked in slightly different formats; - from small boxes, to large unstretched paintings on canvas, to paintings on board, yet her interest remains the same. She is interested in a visual language that matches the ceaseless tension between the natural world and what we as humans, also part of that world, do to our natural world and ourselves.
The recent diptychs (and one triptych) are similar to past series in that they use landscape imagery. But by working with two or more components for each landscape, DEVUONO is able to juxtapose beautiful, and almost clichéd depictions of nature with views of sky and water that are so stripped down as to appear almost abstract and minimal.
Some of these new paintings have fragments of words across the surface, others nearly empty space, and a few have human-made objects mirroring natural phenomena.
From The Stranger (October 24, 2002): "The images are natural, at times just a dab impressionistic—especially where sky is concerned—and as a group they acknowledge the various ways a viewer can see a landscape or its image. Some of them recall the kind of photographic lens that restores the curve to the Earth, a kind of camera obscura image that also has elements of time-lapse photography. DEVUONO'S aim doesn't seem to be to make you comfortable in this setting but to tug at the idea of seeing, here by adding single words to most of her paintings.
"DEVUONO'S current show also includes a cluster of smaller works painted on wooden boxes, so that they substantially stand out from the wall, becoming, in essence, chunks of land and sky. A pair of them ... seem carved right out of a lawn."
