At 90, Spong is Still Active — And Inspirational

Laura Spong has six children and has successfully fought cancer three times.

She’s also created roughly 900 paintings since 1991 — and she’s celebrating her 90th birthday this month.

“Years ago, I’d have been dead long ago,” Spong says of her longevity. She gives some credit to exercise, and also notes there are some genes involved: She has two sisters — one 93, the other 88. 

But mostly, she says, “I think I’m just lucky.”

Spong rings in her upcoming birthday with a retrospective exhibition, Laura Spong at 90: Six Decades in Painting, which opens Feb. 4 at if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808 in the Vista. The show will include approximately 120 paintings — culled from works Spong has retained, as opposed to works she has sold — dating from the 1950s to the present.

Spong, who moved to Columbia with her husband after World War II, has an infectious enthusiasm for the artistic life that might call to mind a late-night session of 20-somethings at The Whig more than, say, the somber quietude of a nursing home.

“You have to let go of your supports if you want to get past the barriers,” she says of being a full-time artist. To immerse yourself in art, you must “jump into the unknown.”

Her love of painting goes all the way back to the 1940s when, as an English major at Vanderbilt, she took a studio art course. The Nashville native has been painting ever since — but it’s only since 1991 that she has devoted herself to it consistently, painting every day. Between raising kids and supporting herself and her family after her husband died in 1973, it took decades for Spong to really establish herself artistically. 

Eventually, she settled on her signature abstract style — one in which subtle gradations of paint interact to evoke an emotional response, not to portray any particular scene or object.

“I don’t have a natural gift for draftsmanship, and I wasn’t interested in it,” Spong says of representational painting. “I felt like I was always copying things, and I didn’t like that.”

Abstraction, on the other hand, felt like a revelation.

“It was a big relief to learn that you could play with colors, shapes and forms and express emotions and feelings in art,” she says.

Her current style began to solidify in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Roefs writes in an essay accompanying the show.

“As she truly hit her stride, Sprong created more intricate paintings with complex, more-subtle compositions in any conceivable palette,” Roefs writes. 

Color plays a big role in Spong’s work — setting the mood, one color morphing into another as the eye moves across the canvas — but she says she rarely thinks about that aspect of her paintings.

When she thinks about what she’s creating at all, she says, “I worry a lot about the composition.” 

In general, though, “I do a lot better if I just plow into it.”

The idea, she says, “is to convey ideas, emotion, spirit — to take you on a journey, and it may not be the journey I was on.”

No, there aren’t too many people who have been on the journey Spong has been on.

“Late in life, Spong managed to become one of South Carolina’s most prominent painters,” says Roefs, whose if ART Gallery represents Spong.

“I feel very fortunate that I’ve got something I’m excited about doing,” Spong says. “If there’s one message I have, it’s don’t feel like you’re too old to do it."

Resource: http://www.free-times.com