ENDORSEMENTS

Laura’s images cause the viewer to really look at her paintings – to consider them. You don’t just look, you ponder. There is life in the images that Laura Janes creates and how fabulous to be able to bring that into your home. 

As an interior designer, I recently had the opportunity to work with Laura on two custom paintings for my clients. What Laura created was wonderful and the client was extremely happy. Through this process Laura was easy to communicate with, listened and understood what the client wanted. She was always professional and did what she said she would do. This was extremely important since we were on a tight schedule!

— Cheryl Urrutia, Allied ASID Certified Interior Designer
Urrutia Architects, Palm Springs, CA

If you have seen Laura Jane’s work then you will know that she is a master at using color and design to capture something true about the nature surrounding your home with views, angles and colors that you are completely familiar with but have never really seen. If you have not yet seen her work, then you owe it to yourself. She has brought to new life quiet mountain lakes, moody desert plants, haunting forest trees and garden flowers in riots of color. Her “eye” sees not only the realistic dimensions of objects but seems to perceive something of their emotional life as well.  While these works serve to beautifully decorate your home and honor the local environment, they are done with such subtlety and depth that they also call you to enter into them where a dark space between rocks or a blue shadow in snow beckons you to look closer, maybe to find something there of yourself. Big canvases and small, she fills the spaces instinctually, sharing her vision of a world inside the world. I have owned and loved two of her larger pieces celebrating Big Bear Lake, one in summer, one in winter, and came to a deeper appreciation of the place I lived. 

— Lorraine Wolfe Camenzuli
Carlsbad, CA

When I first saw Laura Jane's art, I was visiting a design showroom in Palm Springs and was immediately drawn to her perspective of natural landscapes. The presence of human form subtly revealed in her technique and her ability to capture the soul of nature through color, shape and texture with an abstract perspective, were key components to making my final selection of the artist for my own use and for my client's.

Having the opportunity to work one-on-one with Laura Janes was a wonderful and informative experience. She presented a variety of options, working within your budget, by sharing images, size of canvas, intensity of detail and colors. I was inspired by her tranquil character and her passion for nature, which projected into her paintings throughout the project. Her greatest talent is how she speaks through her art and that alone says it all.

— Christina Manney
Dezine Refined
La Quinta, CA

In Laura Janes’ paintings we see the artist’s avid eye at work, alert and searching. She lives in the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California, and is attuned to the high desert and alpine landscape there. She has focused on desert plants, trees, and scenes of light in the forest and on water. In recent work, Janes looks closely at cactus pads, fissures in stones and the bend of a tree branch. This viewpoint is not only an index of Janes' fascination with natural forms, but implies as well a kind of intimacy. She goes beyond a naturalist’s objectivity, and brings herself into a personal relationship with the rocks and plants she depicts.

In her painterly connection to nature, Janes takes us near to the surface of her forms, traveling as if by touch over bark and spines. Her work becomes abstract to the degree that we start to see the world in a new way. The specific identity of a form begins to shift to something unfamiliar. Rocks give way to dark, hidden portals. Agave leaves gather like a school of fish. And throughout are allusions to the human body, an association that Janes makes without any special effort. The limb of a tree appears like an arm, and rounded boulders take on the appearance of bodily forms meeting. The textures of nature remind us of skin seen close-up.

Janes’ continuity of the human and the natural goes beyond a sense of formal similarity. Her paintings are animated by the attention she gives to the nature. There is a sense of liveliness to both rocks and vegetation. Part of that energy is the artist’s own personality emerging through the observable world. Color is heightened, and pushed just beyond the natural. The unexpected is actively sought out. And the play of light on form is always paramount.

Often forms are highlighted against a well of darkness. At times, bleaching daylight creates dark crevices or shards of black shadow. Light brings out a psychedelic turquoise in a cactus or a delicate pink in a swelling stone. Janes’ vision of the world suggests that the division between us and nature is just a concept, ready to be dissolved in the light of our awareness.

— John Mendelsohn

John Mendelsohn is a painter who has written articles and review on contemporary art for Art Net, Cover Magazine, dart International and The Jewish Week as well as essays for exhibition catalogues. He teaches in the Studio Art Program at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He has contributed to the book, A Book of Images: Reflections on Symbols, published by Taschen in conjunction with the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism at the C.G Jung Institute, New York