Laura Letchinger
Los Angeles, CA
urban abstract expressionism . . . Please visit my website for installations, additional sold works and more info.
Message"I began making art when I was little. Drawings, cartoons, calligraphy . . . and countless chalk murals . . . were a huge part of my childhood in a small town outside of Chicago. One of the first memories I have of mark making was when I was very little and discovered piles of new white paper and freshly sharpened pencils in my grandparents’ attic. I vividly remember drawing a single crisp line across the vast emptiness of the paper, and for whatever reason, I loved everything about that. Still do." --L.L.
Laura Letchinger grew up in a small rural town outside Chicago during the 70’s and early 80’s. As a child she spent a lot of time making art, exploring nature, riding horses and playing sports and classical piano. Though she dreamed of being an artist when she grew up, her life took different directions. After earning a double major in pre-med and psychology in 1987, she moved to Chicago and completed coursework for a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Realizing that this was not her calling, she left the program and spent the majority of the 90’s living in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood waiting tables, working in various aspects of film production and corporate show production, and volunteering with a grassroots nonprofit environmental television show where she learned the basics of documentary filmmaking. Soaking up graffiti almost every day while distance running and biking to and from work, that imagery fueled the poetry she wrote at the time and became a strong influence in her future painting practice. Letchinger moved to Los Angeles in 1996 with her husband and began making art consistently in 2013, beginning with portable watercolors while waiting in her son and daughter’s school pick-up lines. Self-taught, her artworks have been collected and placed within the U.S. and internationally by individuals, designers, art consultants, public art agencies, architects and real estate developers, and she has been represented by galleries in Houston and Los Angeles.
Letchinger is a big fan of works by Katherine Dunn, Judithe Hernandez, Helen Frankenthaler, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning, Christopher Wool, Gino Hollander, Mark Bradford and Dirk De Bruycker.
Statement
"I create large contemporary abstract paintings from my studio in Los Angeles. I also collaborate with South L.A. based mosaic arts nonprofit Piece by Piece to produce large combination painting/mosaic artworks.
I paint in a very unplanned, in-the-moment way because it's the best way for me to connect to that universal creative energy that's in and around all of us, all the time. When we're able to really click with it, whether through our jobs, hobbies, our family roles, work in our communities, or even when we're just quietly alone . . . I describe it as a feeling of 'energized calm with inspired momentum', like riding an extremely kind and supportive wave. So for me, painting is way bigger than the individual and the artworks are actually byproducts of this absolutely fascinating partnership. It invokes deep feelings of gratitude and a sense of the potential for this type of creative synergy to help make things better for all of us as we evolve." --L.L.