Col-lab designers collaborate with contemporary artists; bringing together a variety of materials and ideas; co-creating beautiful and functional scarves apparel and accessories which reference and draw attention back to the artists’ original work.
Col-lab designers collaborate with contemporary artists; bringing together a variety of materials and ideas; co-creating beautiful and functional scarves apparel and accessories which reference and draw attention back to the artists’ original work.
Laura’s work is strongly influenced by the natural and man-made world with which we coexist. She seeks to interpret the myriad shapes, textures, and colors into creations in which the beholder can continually find novelty, revelation and humor. She feels the impact of grouping and the mixing of materials often communicates in a more visceral way than the individual parts. In this way Laura creates an artistic response to the organic and man-made materials available within the cultural experience that surrounds objects.
Laura has lived and volunteered on four continents and her art has been impacted by the seemingly-universal imperative of using decorative marks to indicate an object’s or place’s significance. Within the bright colors painted on every indoor and outdoor surface of a home in Bhutan and similarly within the brown and ochre patterns on a mud structure in Ghana, she witnessed the creative methods by which cast-off items can be reused and re-purposed. Acutely aware of the impacts of environmental degradation Laura makes a conscious effort to reuse and reduce in process and in materials. This practice has served to challenge her imagination and propel her art in exciting directions.
“Making art is for me, about a sense of connection; the movement of the oil pastel crayon is what’s most important, rather than what is appearing on the page; it’s the gesture of creating the pieces and the feeling of being in flow. This tends to happen most when I am working on an abstract piece.
“Some of my work originates in feelings of being restrained, bound; seeking to free myself from resistance into liberation. There is an inherent tension in those contrasts and my art has typically been preoccupied with the idea of capturing contrast in motion.
“Motion evolves into a feeling of space, airiness, and in my current work there is a sense of things softening and cloudscapes. I capture sky feelings of floating, images seen in a dream, some are specific and some blur into obscurity. These pieces are based in the figurative intended toward creating impressions of portraits, capturing the essence, look and beauty of the subject. Bodies, faces, music, figures in motion fascinate and challenge me to capture the push-pull tension of stillness and movement, and the moment when stillness becomes motion.”
Jeannette’s early love of Renaissance art led her to study fine art in Florence and then back to Miami where she worked as a gallerist and integrated herself into the rich contemporary art scene. Seeking further inspiration and to expand her artistic community she relocated to Austin, where she found her passion as a figure model. In 2018, Jeannette relocated yet again to Boston where she is currently exploring the contextual and cultural contrasts between the southern states and New England.
In addition to being a professional figure model, Jeannette is a mixed media artist and an abstract painter. She has been layering and repainting a single wooden canvas in an ongoing project that speaks to the act of detaching and letting go. She documents each image, allows the material to breathe, and covers it again with a fresh coat of emotive color and brushstroke. This process has textured the canvas deeply and it now holds the secrets of years in its layers. For Jeannette, creating art is the process she uses to soothe anxiety and she intends to explore the possibilties of art therapy as vehicle for helping herself and others to thrive.
