Laurie Alberts lives in Southern Vermont and winter in an old Airstream camper on a mesa in New Mexico. Her first creative incarnation was as a novelist, short story writer, memoirist and professor of creative writing at several colleges including the University of New Mexico, Hampshire College, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. After publishing eight books, she began painting and never looked back. In the past seven years Alberts has studied with oil painters Rosemary Ladd, Charlie Hunter, Michelle Dunaway, Pam Ingalls, Kate McGloughlin, Julia Jensen, and others.
"If my writing tended toward the grittily realistic, painting has permitted me to transcend the strictly representational in favor of the emotional content of landscapes I’ve inhabited or imagined. Although my writer’s “voice” came naturally to me, my painter’s “voice” is an ever-evolving search for a visual point of view.
I often use cold wax medium mixed with oil paints because it makes the paint more luminous and its thickness and malleability allow for scraping, scratching and the overlay of varied colors and textures. Its very imprecision creates possibilities -- directions I might not have intended, images I hadn’t imagined, paths I want to follow."
