Portfolio > Lou Posner: The Interface Between Life and Art

Inspired by a broom factory in Utah around 1896, this painting depicts workers engaged in the many stages of broom making. Figures, tools, broom corn, and finished brooms crowd the workshop, giving the scene the bustle of a place where nearly everything is being done by hand. Posner worked on the painting intermittently for twelve years and enjoyed the freedom of painting the scene loosely. He also liked to own rules by slipping something unexpected into a painting. Here, amid the workers and broom corn, a white cockatoo makes an improbable appearance. In Posner’s characteristically understated words, “From
start to finish this painting took me 12 years.”