LEOMINISTER, MASS -- August 16, 2002 -- The Thayer Symphony Orchestra has a new music school, the Community School, that will open its doors to its first students September 3. As part of the opening they have selected artworks to decorate their walls and among these are two oil paintings and a pastel drawing by Lawrence Strauss of Worcester, Mass.

Two of the paintings represent Mr Strauss’ guitar, a classical which, because he strums it, has a hole worn almost through the body. Mr Strauss said, “this guitar’s something I love. And painting things I have an emotional connection with is very important to me. Actually this guitar used to be my brother’s, but he gave it to me after I strummed mine all the way through and dislodged the bridge. My father bought the pair of Arias when my brother and I were studying guitar in the ‘70s at the Guitar Workshop on Long Island.”

The third piece is a pastel drawing of the piano player at the Copley Hotel in Boston. “This jazz piano man used to play in the Copley Hotel restaurant area which you got to through a series of overhead walkways and malls. It used to be anyone could go in there, but I’ve heard it’s reconfigured now, so I don’t know. This pastel drawing from the late ‘80s was not done on location, but from a charcoal sketch and memory. I used to hang around there as a college student, amazed at the wealth, the perfection.”

Mr Strauss said that although he is concerned with the representative aspects of pictures and their emotional content, often his work is about color and design. “I work almost exclusively with earth colors, as it transports me mentally back to times before synthetics. I think it puts me in the frame of mind of feeling I have to answer to my forebears. I’m part of a lineage. And I get excited sticking to the purity of the idea expressed by my teacher, Arthur Polonsky, that the high art of painting is mucking around with colored muds. I am always trying to achieve new and vibrating color harmonies with this small palette of colored muds that I’ve been mucking with since the late ‘80s.”

Lawrence Strauss is a painter who tries to visually represent his core understanding of his subject; he tries to bring the inside of his subject out. He was schooled by what’s known as the Second School of Boston Painters (also called Expressionists), which includes David Aronson, John Wilson and Arthur Polonsky.

For more information about the Thayer Symphony Orchestra, headquartered at 14 Monument Square in Leominster, contact Jill at 978-466-1800.