ABOUT
LAURA
BIO
Laura Varsafsky is a landscape painter, working primarily in oil, watercolor and pastel. Laura grew up in Steamboat Springs, a small Colorado ski town with a vibrant arts community. Laura loved exploring the mountains with family and friends, where hiking and skiing around in search of the perfect view to paint became an obsession at an early age. As a teenager, she illustrated books for the local history museum, designed logos for local businesses and studied plein air painting under local professional artists. Laura is also a classically trained dancer and has gone on to have a career as a licensed Architect, both disciplines which have informed her creative process. Laura, painting professionally since 2003, now resides in Denver, CO. Her work has been exhibited in restaurants, shops, and private art shows around Colorado. Laura’s paintings are held in private collections in Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, New York, Arizona, and the UK.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I create paintings, primarily in oils, from wild places I explore. We are biophilic creatures who feel most alive when surrounded by nature. For me this instinct is overwhelming, compelling me to reinterpret the patterns, textures and colors found in nature, as paintings. I am a visual and kinetic communicator, and the making of a mark is how I connect to my world. My works are not a conjuring of my imagination; they are a collection of visual facts – observations, photos, sketches – that are layered with my memories and intuition. When I paint, I use this information to preserve a feeling from a moment in time when color and light build fleeting architectural shapes and patterns to which we are innately drawn.
PROCESS
Shadows cast on aspen trees, the depth of late afternoon light across a mountainscape, or the way light and color from the sky bounces around on a lake are some of my favorite subjects. The places I study are in two very contrasting geographies: Colorado mountains and Minnesota lakes. The brilliant, dry Colorado climate creates dramatic colors and edges, while the overcast humid Minnesota climate offers soft, nuanced colors and shapes.
On aspens: I'm not the first artist with aspens as my muse, and I won't be the last. There's the symbolism of this incredible organism, united by a single root system and one of the first species to come back after a wildfire. Walking through a glittering gold fall aspen forest or skiing through a silent snowy one is a quintessential Colorado experience. And then there is the opportunity for artistic expression: aspens offer a fascinating intersection of shape and color: round + white. The reflected colors across all the tree trunks result in intricate, architectural mosaics only Mother Nature could dream up. I painted my first aspen tree trunk as a teenager in the backyard of my childhood home in Steamboat Springs and have gone on to consistently study five or so specific aspen groves tucked in the mountains between Steamboat and Denver. Over the past 20 years, I return seasonally to these groves, observing how the forests have grown, evolved, or died, adding photos to a collection that now numbers in the thousands.
I am a lifelong student of the arts. Years of studying and performing ballet, followed by a career as a licensed Architect have taught me about rigor, showing up for the creative process, and how to 'begin' when you don't know where to begin. Perhaps the most delightful thing about the arts is how they are all connected; advancing my experience in one area of study inevitably informs another. I'm a passionate problem solver, idea-generator, and maker; a dozen lifetimes of art and making would never be enough for me!