Artist Lianne Alcon – Expressionism Meets Impressionism

Artist Lianne Alcon’s works are mostly vibrant portrayals of women. Born in Spain, she was brought to the States by her mother after her divorce from Lianne’s father. The pair moved to Miami to join her grandmother, an accountant who owned her own business. Lianne’s mother went to school for veterinarian medicine, but ended up with a PhD in microbiology.

It is growing up in this “female-dominated household of strong women” that has inspired the artist’s work. Her pieces, she says, encompass her view of women: “soft and sexy and at the same time strong and powerful.”
She and her mother moved to a rural college town in Mississippi for a short spell during high school, long enough for Lianne to fall in love with her first boyfriend. Then it was back to the urban sprawl of Miami with the bright colors and Art Deco architecture she so admires.

Alcon uses bright colors in her paintings, such as the orange dress with black polka dots on her image of a sevillana (flamenco dancer). “Spanish dancers remind me of home,” she says. “They are sexy and curvy and powerful and feminine.” She paints them mostly from memory, stealing a glance at a photograph for a sense of anatomy.

“Bright colors make me feel good,” she says. “A lot of time when I’m painting I’m purging emotions. It’s a way to express feelings whether it’s happiness or frustration, a way of getting it out.” Blue, her favorite color, dominates her oeuvre, with punches of warm reds and oranges used as foils for the coldness of blue and to make the pieces “pop.”

“I’m very influenced by Van Gogh and Gaugin, who both tended to use pure colors and bold images.”

She was married “very young,” at 18, so she moved briefly to Ohio where her husband’s family lived and attended Ohio University. After a divorce, she transferred to Shawnee State University where the “art program was better.” She studied fine art with a concentration in digital art. Today her day job is as a graphic artist at Sotheby’s International Realty in the Hamptons, where her title is Marketing Coordinator. Before that she was Creative Director at Dan’s Papers.

She thinks of her work as both Impressionistic and Expressionistic – “de Kooning meets Van Gogh.” And she has a point. “de Kooning expressed more about what he felt while painting, rather than the Impressionists who created impressions of what they were looking at. My brush strokes and the looseness of my figures are more Expressionistic. My colors and retaining something of the figure are more like the Impressionists.”

Her paintings are alive with swirling strokes and the visual imprint of her brushes. Lately, she has steered away from her usual oils and acrylics to embrace ink. These nudes are given a dramatic edge by her allowing the ink to drip liberally over the image. “I’ve been drawing since I was able to hold a crayon, she says. “It feeds the soul.”

Her work has mostly been shown in the Hamptons at such galleries as The White Room Gallery, Romany Kramoris Gallery and Ashawagh Hall. Her paintings have found homes with private collectors in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Spain.