LaManche creates large-scale works that enliven the built environment, adding meaning, color and ranges of feeling. Their work is often characterized by vivid color and playful figures or a layered use of symbolic & iconographic detail. “Vibrant, with a touch of whimsy”… “Saturated dreamscapes sit astride personal and evocative moments to create heightened emotional realities.”
In recent years LaManche has gravitated more and more to urban art as a means of communication and of starting a public dialogue, using symbolic themes of social justice and human connection. “It’s my personal belief that to save the world and our species, we need to put aside tribalism and greed, and work together on a species-wide level, learning to accept and love one another as family.“
“I want to brighten people’s day with color and humor, or take them out of daily routine and connect them with their greater experience of being human together in this time and place.”
–LLM
BIO:
Thanks to living abroad at an impressionable age, Liz LaManche grew up with a sense that there are many different ways of being and a big, fascinating and colorful world out there. Their imaginary worlds and creatures, and perverse desire to decorate everything, started appearing early in life.
They spent their early childhood in Turkey and Germany, and were influenced by early exposure to the people, art and architecture of Europe and Turkey, by French comic books, and by their grandfather, a Romanian amateur artist. Attending school in Connecticut, LaManche received a B.A. in Architecture at Yale University. There they studied graphic design with Inge Druckrey, and did a thesis project in architectural ornament/site specific urban installations advised by ornamentalist and sculptor Kent Bloomer.
They have spent much of their career as a designer for online media, running her own studio since 2001 (EmphasisCreative.com), and painting all the while.
Since 2004 Liz has also been working in large-scale paintings, some lit with custom-programmed color-changing LED light. Their 40-foot permanent outdoor color-changing mural in Hyattsville, MD, completed in 2013, was the first of its kind.
EDUCATION:
LaManche earned a B.A. in Architecture at Yale (Cum Laude, Distinction in the Major), later studying drawing and painting at the Art Institute of Boston (AIB).
“I love to play with making visible the magical alternate-universe potential of real people and places. I often see in the image of a person or place, the super-alter-ego that is mischievous whimsy and vivid color. Sometimes that augmented self has a more mysterious story.” -LLM