About Me

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Lolly Owens, born in Pittsburgh, PA, is an artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, photography, and assemblages. Her artwork has been exhibited both nationally and internationally from St. Alberts Gallery, St. Alberts, Canada to the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs Florida, to Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, Oakdale, PA.

Growing up a manufacturing town, her bond with Nature is an ongoing interrelationship that acknowledges the mirage of abundance with the reality of depletion. As a mixed media artist, she artist focuses on the changing environments due to human contact. This contact can be destructive or healing. Owens’ interests include protecting the environment, sharing the secret lives of trees and motivating young people to become aware of their kinship to Nature and how they influence and depend on each other.

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A graduate of Chatham College, she first heard of alumna Rachel Carson (1907-1964) whose work is credited with launching the modern environmental movement.  After reading Carson’s book Silent Spring, Owens developed a series of work inspired by her life and work and began to use more earth tones, texture and written messages.

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Steel making, coal mining, carbon capture, and fracking allow people to make good wages, feed their families, and pay for educations. It also fouls the air releasing toxic levels of benzene and other pollutants linked to significant premature deaths. They contaminate both the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers marring water for plants, animals and humans.

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Owens sees both the depletion and struggling beauty. She paints vibrant landscapes or abstract figures on on wood panels, canvas or paper. Inspired by direct observation, she forges emotional connections to places, people or wildlife. Her techniques include dynamic movement, layers of color, blurred lines between realism and abstraction and written words in her work as a form of protest.

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She offers a view of the world that is both grounded and transcendental.

Her process includes long walks in western Pennsylvania woods or processing plants for sketches and photos and then meditating, painting, and refining details in her studio. She revamps material found on her walks such as dried leaves, bark, wire, feathers and eggshells and adds them to her art.

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Owens currently lives and maintains a studio in Canonsburg, PA. In her hometown she first encountered Nature at her grandmother’s home on Giffin Street, where the garden was tended and chickens ran free while her grandfather died of black lung disease. Today she actively embraces a wider world where she combines the past and the present for a brighter future in the spirit of Rachel Carson’s words: “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of Nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”