Timeline: 2013

Self-taught, in early 2013 I started sketching small watercolors in the car as I waited for my kids in school pickup lines. This quickly developed into larger acrylic and mixed media paintings, made in a wide hallway in our home, before my studio expanded into the living room. After decades of putting aside my childhood determination that I would be a professional artist, creativity was rushing onto painted canvas for the first time — in my 40's. A friend suggested I sell what I was making on Etsy, which is how early collectors and designers found my work.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I make mostly large oil and mixed-media paintings rooted in the harmonizing rhythms of nature. Fundamental to a healthy planet and a compassionate, thriving global society, this energy informs my work as it balances order and entropy in abstraction, manifests its transformative intelligence into biological form, and regulates the pulse of contemporary urban life.

My process has always centered in a strong partnership with collective creative energy, a synergy that quiets analytical thinking and amplifies intuitive flow. Guided by this internal knowing, most artworks emerge through spontaneous gestural mark-making, organic lines and shapes, movement, textured layers, and unexpected color and compositions. Emanating from our interconnectedness with all life as one diverse, living ecosystem, these paintings invite a deeper resonance with the heart—an inner alignment that softens our edges and inspires the compassionate action needed to holistically re-form our fragmented world.

BIO

Laura Letchinger grew up in a small rural town west of Chicago, where she spent much of her early childhood filling an oversized basement chalkboard with intricate nature-based drawings—creative seeds nurtured by the overwhelming freedom she felt playing in nearby fields and forests. Whether riding horses in her younger years, experiencing collective flow on the basketball court in high school, or biking and distance running the streets of Chicago in her twenties, these core connections with expansive energy inform the canvases she instinctively explores today. Her artistic foundation was deepened by decades of classical piano and insights into the human condition were gained from studying pre-medicine and psychology. Environmental activism and an intense curiosity about how our spiritual nature exists in human form established a lifelong sensitivity to energetic balance and intuition. Much of her work is a contemporary blend of expressionism and post-impressionism—an immersive dance with source energy that brings her paintings to life and radiates into the spaces they inhabit.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1996, Letchinger 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 Los Angeles and Houston.