ABOUT CORINNE MESNER

Corinne Mesner is a passionate abstract expressionist from Los Angeles, California. Her love for art began in high school, but it wasn’t until after she graduated from UCLA with a degree in Communication Studies that she realized she wanted to communicate through painting, rather than writing.

Her early artwork depicted vacant faces in an impressionist style, but she decided to move into the abstract direction because she felt it better translated her experiences living in Hollywood in her early twenties. To broaden her creative skills, Corinne earned a degree in Graphic Arts Technology in 1998, landing her a role as the creative director for a web design agency in El Segundo, Ca.

In 1994, Corinne’s paintings were featured in an award-winning short film called “The Piece”. She was commissioned to paint a 72” x 48” portrait of Marilyn Monroe, titled "The Blonde", for this same film. In the 1990s, she exhibited her paintings in coffee shops, restaurants and art galleries in Los Angeles and Iowa City.

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After raising her 2 daughters, Corinne’s desire to paint was overwhelming from all the years she had put it on the back-burner. In 2017 she began a new series called “Mood Safari”. This series explored the year of 2016, which was a difficult, yet explosive growth period in Corinne’s life. It is dedicated to Nancy Fawcett, a psycho-therapist who had a major impact on Corinne’s life and sadly passed away during their work together. Her 2016 series uses ambiguous placement of color choices which she shapes into contours of contained boundaries existing among chaos.

A consistent theme in Corinne’s art is the use of color and shape to represent emotions.  Corinne’s technique is contained impulsivity; her colors are intentional while her brush strokes express feelings. She prefers acrylic paint, as it’s drying time allows her to juxtapose colors quickly.

Corinne hopes to evoke some kind of heartfelt reaction in her viewers while taking the shame out of emotions and mental illness. If  she could communicate one thing, it would be to honor the feelings we have inside us.

Corinne’s influences are Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso and Cy Twombly.