Laura Culic
My paintings are my response to my deep and profound feelings for the Canadian landscape. As I paint I reflect upon ideas such as topography; history; journeying and mapmaking; Canada’s first peoples; the landscape and our relationship to it. My paintings, in turn, reflect these concepts.
My process initially, is intuitive. In a spontaneous manner I apply many layers of beeswax, oil paint, dry pigment, charcoal and marble dust; add various marks and lines with beeswax crayons, graphite, oil sticks and pastels. I alternate warm and cool colours; opaque and transparent layers; scrape back areas, score lines, marks and texture into the soft wax. Eventually, cohesion emerges: the painting acquires its direction. The process then becomes a selective and evaluative one; choosing what to obscure, alter or reveal; until the painting’s surface acquires history and meaning: a presence. It becomes an environment.
Although not specific in subject matter, my paintings possess the qualities of light and space, depth and atmosphere, a sense of history and a richness and ruggedness of texture, evocative of the land and its lakes, rivers and terrain.
My influences are many and varied. I greatly admire historic atmospheric landscape painters George Inness and J.W. Turner; abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler; and contemporary Canadian abstract painter Landon Mackenzie.
I studied fine art and illustration, many moons ago, at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
I am an elected member of the Ontario Society of Artists. And I’m very proud that my paintings have won awards including Best in Show at the Ontario Society of Artist’s 139th Open Juried Exhibition and Best in Painting at the 51st Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, and are part of many corporate and private art collections, as well as the Art Collection of the Government of Ontario.
Currently Available in the Gallery
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Past Works
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