In the Studio

THE ARTWORK PROCESS Every artwork begins for Laurie by gathering her materials: acrylic paint, ink, pen, and an ever-growing archive of collage elements — vintage road maps, antique sheet music, old letters, newspaper fragments, and bold typographic graphics. These papers become her canvas before she ever picks up a brush. She starts with the botanical subject: a flower, a weed, a stem she knows from childhood walks in the Colorado foothills. She sketches it in ink, then builds form and color with acrylic paint, allowing strong outlines to give each plant a graphic, defined presence. The collage elements are layered underneath and around the figure — sometimes suggesting the place where the plant grew, sometimes telling an entirely different story that the viewer is left to interpret. The tension between the organic and the archival is intentional. A road map gives a flower a geography. A fragment of sheet music gives it rhythm. A piece of old correspondence gives it a voice. Laurie works intuitively through this layering process, balancing readability with discovery — she wants every viewer to find something in the piece that feels personal, as though they stumbled upon it rather than purchased it. She works in series — state flowers, childhood plants, botanicals from her travels — returning to familiar subjects with fresh grounds, so that no two works carry exactly the same story even when the central subject is shared.