The Coral Crown

The figures in Lara Dann’s paintings are ruled by appetites insatiable, carnal, and forbidden. Drawing from Asian folklore and creatures of the night, her delicately-layered visions show the living and the restless undead ripened by passions, their neon hues and bejeweled eyes illuminated with desire. Like a sudden, sinful whisper entering stainless ears.

“One often feels most fervently what lies — and remains — out of one’s grasp. That beauty that allures us…isn’t it treacherous the way it makes us reach out, tip our balance one way or another? I know it is so. And still I reach,” Dann writes in her bio.

The now Denver-based artist worked for six years in graphic design and over the last four has redirected her focus towards fine art. In the last three years she has gone on to showcase at the Hive and Flower Pepper galleries in Los Angeles, the Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, and New York’s Last Rites Gallery. She was raised all over California, with detours in Vermont and Washington. She finished school at New York State, graduated high school in 1989.

“In the past, when I had pursued fine art, my work involved incorporating natural objects. It’s since evolved from depiction of the natural and external world to exploration of the internal landscapes of memory, dream, fantasy.” (By Daniel Barron)