Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Wooten.
Laura, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I have been making art since I could hold a crayon, and my work continues to be influenced by the gardens and landscapes of my childhood. Growing up in an old house with a rambling yard in verdant Baltimore county, and spending summers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I came to love the landscape as a place of solitude, personal reflection, and family connection. I’m interested in the relationships between nature, culture, and family that shape our traditions, our sense of place, and our feelings of belonging. Through a close observation of the natural world, with layers of memory and invention, I create artwork that values our human connection to the landscape.
I earned my undergraduate degree in Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia and continued on at UVA as an Aunspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Studio Art before earning my MFA from American University in Washington, D.C. During graduate school, I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Perugia, Italy, at the Accademia de Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci, where the panoramic Mediterranean landscape took hold of my imagination.
My landscape paintings have been exhibited across the East Coast, including juried exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware, and the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Boston. I have taught painting and drawing at the University of Virginia and Piedmont Community College, and have guest lectured at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
My current work reflects my interest in painting the landscape of my daily experience: the fields and meadows of central Virginia, views to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains from my hilltop neighborhood, and the way trees mark the passing of time in my own backyard. My paintings explore the places they represent, as well as the inner landscape of my experience and how it might be shared. Color, shape, and mark fall in service to the perception of an emotional presence in the land that is both highly personal and universally human. The landscape painting becomes a mirror into our own histories, reveries, and associations.
My landscapes are not pure, unmitigated nature. I frame my compositions to include the side of a house, the corner of an eave, the curve of a planting bed, or the edge of the patio. Conceptually, I am interested in our human connection to nature and place. Visually, I am interested in the flat shapes of color from the built world that contrast with the diaphanous screens of plants and trees. More personally, I’m interested in how a landscape reflects a life, and how a painting can simultaneously hold an entire world of personal history, memory, imagination, and the fleeting patterns of light from just one moment.
I work both outdoors from observation, and in the studio. When painting plein air, I am responding to an ephemeral experience of color, atmosphere, and light. Back in the studio, I am more concerned with memory, emotion, and intuition. I am engaged with building a personal iconography and painterly language that can translate my ideas about home, rootedness, and connection to a painted surface. I am not aiming to simply create a realistic rendering of the world, but to create a visual metaphor for my experience. My observations come with associations, memories, and emotions coloring my vision and I like to allow these layers. My work involves a surrender to this process, allowing emotions to come and go, responding to the whole spectrum of experiences in living, seeing, feeling, rooting, remembering, and creating.
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
First and foremost, build a healthy relationship with your studio practice that is consistent, positive, and sustainable. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with small, consistent actions over time. I went through phases when it was very challenging for me to juggle work, motherhood, and time in the studio. A commitment to my practice sustained my momentum. One year I made 52 small weekly collages. Other years I did a small drawing or painting on paper every day. Now I have more studio time available and am free to enjoy working on larger panels, but I still keep regular studio hours and a strong commitment to my own growth and development as an artist. I follow my curiosity and allow myself to continually experiment, welcoming happy accidents and fresh ways of seeing and working.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
On the web: http://laurawootenstudio.com
Instagram: @laurawootenstudio
Upcoming Exhibitions:
You Are Here – Landscape/Cityscape
May 24th – July 20th, 2018
The Mosesian Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA
Paperworks 2018, The Inventive Eye: Observation, Transformation & the Art of Seeing
June 21st – July 29th, 2018
Upstream Gallery, Hastings-On-Hudson, NY
Teeny Tiny Trifecta
September 7th – 28th, 2018
Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville VA
Ongoing Exhibition:
Mediterranean Landscapes
Orzo Kitchen & Wine Bar, Charlottesville VA
Contact Info:
- Website: www.laurawootenstudio.com
- Email: laura@laurawootenstudio.com
- Instagram: @laurawootenstudio
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurawootenstudio
Image Credit:
Laura Wooten, artwork photography
Jennifer Rous, personal photo
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