Artist Profile
Laurie S Waalkes
“Laurie S. Waalkes spent three decades shaping young minds in Colorado classrooms before discovering what she'd always known: her truest language was art. Now working from her studio in Wheat Ridge, she creates mixed-media collages that place beloved native botanicals — dandelions, yucca, wild onions, state flowers — on…”
Biography
Based in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, Laurie is a mixed-media collage artist whose work bridges the natural world and the human record — layering botanical illustration with vintage maps, sheet music, handwritten letters, and bold graphics to create pieces that feel at once intimate and discovered. She arrived at her full-time art career, as she puts it, "through the side door," following 30 years in public education and a lifelong parallel life as a creative. Summers were spent at painting workshops; theater gave her early training in storytelling and expression. When she retired, she dove headlong into an intensive mentorship and emerged with a complete, cohesive body of work in a voice entirely her own. Raised in the Rocky Mountains as a third-generation Coloradan — and mother to fourth-generation Colorado natives — Laurie draws her subjects from the landscape she has always loved. Humble, often-overlooked plants take center stage: yucca, mullein, dandelions, locoweed, pussywillows. She paints them boldly onto fragments of old maps, vintage quotations, and musical scores, so that every piece becomes a layered narrative, what she calls a "treasure hunt that can become very personal" for the viewer who discovers it. Her work is represented by Taos Blue Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, Diane West Gallery in Durango, Colorado, and Blue Sky Art Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A veteran of the Wheat Ridge Artist Studio Tour, she is a recognized voice in the Colorado arts community — one who turned a career pivot into a calling, and found that creativity, far from being suppressed, had simply been waiting.
Process
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.
Studio
