About
She was always going to be the artist.
Verbal expression never came easily. As a child I was a daydreamer, and I spent many hours in my imaginative world.
Laurie grew up on Long Island, drawing constantly. Family and friends had already decided the question: she would be the artist. A grandmother painted alongside her, and a couple of high school teachers pushed hard at exactly the right moment.
She studied at Parsons School of Design and stayed in New York, in the museums and the galleries and the middle of the art scene. Then came the commercial years: illustration, graphic design, and eventually a creative directorship in the toy industry, where she built award-winning toys with National Geographic and the Smithsonian and ran a studio full of designers she liked enormously.
It was a good career, but she wanted to paint. After a long stretch in commercial art she stopped and went to it full time.
She works in Santa Ana now, in a sunny studio in her backyard, usually with two dogs underfoot. Lucy and Buddy.
Statement
The work is abstract mixed media. Acrylic, paper, pastels and markers go down in layers to make patterns, textures and symbols, bold geometric shapes set against looser organic ones.
Layers get built up, washed over, then scraped and scratched back into. What survives that adding and taking away is a kind of visual history of the piece, and it rewards standing there a while.
All those years in commercial art feed it. After a long time inside the rigid box of graphic design, being able to make something for its own sake is the whole point.
Working method
- Medium
- Abstract mixed media. Acrylic, paper, pastels and markers.
- Approach
- Intuitive layering. Built up, scraped back, built up again.
- Forms
- Bold geometric shapes against looser organic ones.
- Trained
- Parsons School of Design, New York.
- Studio
- Santa Ana, California.
- Sold
- Directly, by inquiry.
In private collections
Her paintings hang in homes in Canada, Hong Kong, New York, California, New England and Washington, DC, through private commissions and her own solo shows. She travels a lot, and it shows up in the work.