Lori Lorion’s “The Dream Awake” featured in Visual Arts Gallery

“It doesn’t come from the senses, it comes from the body — it doesn’t come from the brain,” said MHCC visual arts instructor Lori Lorion, about the inspiration behind her paintings. About 20 of Lorion’s paintings are currently on display inside Mt. Hood’s Visual Arts Gallery. The exhibit opened on Monday, and continues through Feb. 27.

The work being displayed is a series titled “The Dream Awake,” and shows representations of different types of cycles that Lorion has observed. “I saw that they were related and seems that they’re about cycles, seasons, and dreams. The cycles of the day, and dream state, conscious state — they seem to be reflections of those sorts of things,” she said.

The earliest works were begun in 2010 while Lorion was on sabbatical. “Some of them actually took me three years. There’s a real different element of rhythm in the paintings. Some are more gestural, and more expressionistic, and some, you could feel the sense of time in them,” she said.

Lorion has painted for 25 years, and finds it to be her primary form of expression. “It’s my first language, the world I live in,” she said. “It’s all about being lost in this language, and this language is color. You’re speaking the language of color, and form. For a painter, those colors are your language and it’s not about trying to translate it back into English, it is what it is: the language.”

Deborah Sangolt, one of Lorion’s students, explained that painters live in a unique realm of existence. She compares painting to alchemy. “The alchemy consists of the elements of the soul. In each color, it represents a small aspect of that soul,” Sangolt said.

Lorion elaborated: “While you’re painting, you’re not in that realm of thinking. You’re not putting a language together in that way — (where) words are strung together from left to right — you’re not there at all. “You’re in a world of this other realm where your body’s moving, and you’re feeling things, you’re moving the goo around, and then your brain comes in periodically to do its little chore, which is helpful, but it’s not the thing that’s in charge,” she said.

Lorion encourages people to search for forms of artistic expression that don’t rely heavily on the reasoning of the brain. She believes art is something necessary for humans to function, she

said. “It’s not a frill. It’s what the human being needs to be alive, and reflect on. Artists remind people of the miracle of life.

“This is an opportunity to express other realities that are as much a reality as the world that we maneuver through,” she continued. “When you let go of having a painting having to mimic a three-dimensional world, that’s when you open up to this whole language, and color, and you don’t care what your subject matter is, you’re feeling the language of the paint speaking to you — that’s exciting.”

Viewing a painting is an experience in itself, according to Lorion. “The same way that you would get on a path in the backwoods of Oregon, and you respond to nature — a painting, when you stand in front of it, the experience of that painting feeds the human psyche in the same way. It should be an experience. That’s why it’s no good to look at it online, it’s no good to see it in a book.

“You stand before it, and there is such quality and reality to it that communicates life essences for those who are open to see it,” she said. The Visual Arts Gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.