Pomegranates

2025

Laurie has always believed that every plant holds a story — that the humble and the overlooked carry within them entire histories waiting to be seen. In this piece, she turns to the pomegranate: ancient, abundant, cross-cultural. She paints it not on blank canvas but on layers of Greek newsprint, its columns of foreign text visible beneath the painted surface like something remembered rather than invented. The fruit seems to grow out of language itself, as though words were the soil. The turquoise background is the Colorado sky translated into something Mediterranean, a reminder that beauty crosses borders as easily as seeds do. The leaves are painted with the same confident, illustrative hand Laurie brings to her yucca and mullein — bold outlines, deep greens, the kind of mark that says: I have looked at this carefully and I want you to look too. The pomegranates glow with a warmth that feels almost edible, almost urgent, three generations of ripeness caught at exactly the right moment. For the viewer willing to slow down, the newsprint offers its own treasure hunt — half-legible headlines, columns of meaning just out of reach. Laurie has always said her work becomes personal to the people who discover it. Here, a Greek reader might find a headline; someone else might find a metaphor. Everyone finds something. That is the gift she leaves inside every piece.