I make drawings and prints in black and white. The drawings are charcoal on paper and the prints intaglio etching and acquatint. The imagery is always collected with a 35mm camera and color film, which seems to offer more information from which to choose. Although I use no photomechanical or tracing process, photography plays an important conceptual role, enforcing an implacable objectivity that accepts whatever presents itself to the camera, without regard to human intention. Composition takes place in the studio, where the images are cropped or combined in the process of drawing.

My goal is to give the visual experience of our everyday surroundings the suggestive power of abstract painting, making the picture a theater for the viewer's response a mental landscape in which the imagination and memory can wander. I look for imagery where change is slow, sentiment is absent, and chips are down: the confrontation of the natural with the constructed landscape, the eroded boundary of the shore and the lake, and the weathered remains of urban architecture and industry, to express affection for a worn-out city, the essential nobility of any structure in sunlight, and an increasing preoccupation with past time.

born: 1942, Boston, Massachusetts

education

Yale University, BFA, MFA, 1968

selected awards/honors

Individual Artist Fellowships, Ohio Arts Council, 1990, 1998, 2003, 2007
Cleveland Arts Prize, 2000

selected publications

American Artist, May 2001
American Painters, 2000
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Dream Streets: The Urban Landscapes of Laurence Channing and Douglas Lucak. Cleveland, OH. Exhibition brochure, 1999

selected solo or two-person exhibits

The Bonfoey Gallery, Laurence Channing: New Drawings, Cleveland, 2006
The Bonfoey Gallery, Laurence Channing: New Drawings, Cleveland, 2003
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Dream Streets:
The Urban Landscapes of Laurence Channing and Douglas Lucak. Cleveland, OH., 1999
William Busta Gallery, Laurence Channing: New Drawings, Cleveland, 1997

selected group shows

7th Regimental Armory, 20th Annual Works on Paper Show, New York, NY, 2008
Akron Art Museum, New Master Drawings, Akron, Ohio, 2005
Reeves Contemporary, Charcoal Drawings:
Judith Foosaner, Ethan Murrow, Elzbieta Sikorska, Laurence Channing, New York, NY, 2003
7th Regimental Armory, 17th Annual Works on Paper Show, New York, NY, 2005