Louise Wallendorf was born and raised on Long Island, New York. She is an artist/engineer who combines lifelong passions for the ocean, drawing and printmaking.
Louise studied drawing as a teenager in an atelier setting with Iroka Redmond in Garden City, NY and has continued a lifetime interest in mastering life drawing, most recently as monitor of open sessions at Maryland Hall.
Self Portrait, mezzotint, 2013
As an ocean engineer at the US Naval Academy, she has designed fluid dynamics experiments and looked at water almost every day for the past thirty years. She has been able to study the waters of the coastal United States, focusing on the environmental restoration of Chesapeake Bay. Louise organized a Solutions to Coastal Disasters Conference series from 2002 to 2015. In 2019 she was awarded the Orville Magoon Sustainable Coasts Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
In 2016 she was awarded an art/science residency in a dune shack in Cape Cod National Seashore by Peaked Hill Trust. During this residency she began developing a process called surf lithography. Her recent art work is focused on surf lithography, inspired by Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay and other bodies of water that she visits while travelling. She editions her lithographs at Aqua Regia studio in Arnold, MD. As a member of Zea Mays Printmaking Studio, she keeps abreast of the most current environmentally friendly print processes and her prints are contained in their annual flat file portfolio.