Launch LA is proud to announce A Love Letter, a two person exhibition by Lynne McDaniel and Lindsey Warren that poetically paints a love letter to the city of Los Angeles through light dappled vignets of the often overlooked corners of the city. Rather than an exact replica of specific locations, both artists create work that address the overall feeling of living in Los Angeles, woven together through smokey panoramic vistas and sunset streaked skies.

Using the language of landscape to explore current events, as well as the sometimes-surprising beauty of urban existence, Lynne McDaniel’s work deals with her anxiety over events in the news. “My art making is my response to whatever is affecting my world. In my home in California, I am surrounded by images of fires and drought, yet signs of change are everywhere and often more subtle.” Through monochromatic colors in the dreamy atmospheric style of Chinese handscrolls, McDaniel paints panoramic views of the environmental and ecological changes to the landscape caused by natural disasters, human intervention, and the passage of time. The scenes may be beautiful, but there is always an element of unease. The incursion may be a subtle dash of color, or a more violent stroke or erasure. What results is a reflection of perceived destabilization or interruption, a growing uncertainty about what is happening on the larger canvas of our world.

Juxtaposed against McDaniel’s monochromatic paintings, Lindsey Warren’s recent urban landscape paintings flush with a colorful palette that celebrates the unique light of the city of Los Angeles. Through nostalgia and rediscovery of her hometown, after 15 years on the east coast, her series of urban landscape paintings affectionately represent LA from a variety of perspectives. Suburban landscaping and trees paired with utilitarian facades that frame the changing hues of the sky, generating individual portraits of neighborhoods within the sprawling city. Warren is drawn to dramatic and fleeting light that produces unique color experiences that depict specific places in the city, but with a universality that anyone who lives in Los Angeles might find familiar. Synthetic and natural elements combine to create the scenes that are exclusive to this urban Southern California landscape. Through a process of combining photographic references, systematic processes, perception and memory, Warren translates specific moments in time into the presented compositions.

“The paintings,” says Warren, “are visual responses to my past and current homes and stem from observations of basic daily encounters that are commonly overlooked. Since returning to Los Angeles in 2015 I have been focusing on representing the magical light and diverse environments of this city, resulting in portraits of viewpoints and neighborhoods that I frequent and love.”