Laina Terpstra is an abstract, figurative painter based in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, where her focus was Painting, Modern Dance, Philosophy and Theology. Laina's background in modern dance informs her work, in her sensitivity to movement and gesture. The tactility of the paint and her acute awareness of touch evoke a kinesthetic empathy on the part of the viewer that draws one into the internal motion of both the evoked space, and the physical, tactile present. Her compositions, largely influenced by 17th century Dutch painting, veer toward abstraction, yet also retain an internal scaffolding of realistic space and light. Forms are deconstructed and distilled to their purest elements so that what is left is merely the code of an image that your mind is compelled to complete. Her work explores this liminal place where spaces are sensed rather than recognized, and defined through a logic of sensation, movement, and vibration.