Natalie Schorr began her career as an artist focusing on realistic drawings and watercolors. These days, Schorr has been focused on mixed media, employing collage and printmaking to create unique works one might call “Renaissance patchwork.”
Her portraits mainly portray oddly scaled female figures, sprouting wings, halos, and body sections inspired by the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, assuming those artists had been familiar with platform shoes. Schorr’s latest exhibit, "Flash Fiction," is on display at The University Galleries at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University through October 13.
WFDD's Neal Charnoff spoke with Schorr at WFDD's studios.
Interview highlights:
On the materials one might find in her studio:
"You would find magazines from anywhere from the 20s on up, books from the 1700s on up. I'm a great scavenger of stuff ... paper stuff, and wallpaper. I love vintage wallpaper!"
On the piece entitled 'Her Improvised Wings':
"It actually comes from a story that when I was doing motion pictures, we were shooting in a convent, and a nun and I were talking. And she was telling me how in her society when she grew up, you only had two choices in life, and one was to be a mother, and the other was to be a nun. And so she said that if you wanted to travel, if you wanted to do something different with your life, you became a nun. And I never really had thought of it that way. And so 'Her Improvised Wings' kind of grew out of that story."
On how Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci play a role in her work:
"Well, you grew up with all these art books, and certainly in college and grad school, you know, I amassed a lot of them. And one day I just, I don't know, I looked at them and I went, 'It's time for these to change,' and I just started cutting them up."