About the Artist
Laura Kazzaz is originally from Pennsylvania, moving to Denver at a young age. She is a largely self taught artist who has been painting for 25 years. She learned her craft from books, magazines, and workshops and lots of practice. Through her love of travel and environment she is inspired by the places she visits. She is also an environmental scientist, graduating with an environmental science degree in 1998. She donates 10% of all her sales to environmental protection non profit organizations. Kazzaz and her husband live in Denver, Colorado.
Artist Statement
Laura Kazzaz is a landscape artist who juxtaposes strong and vibrant colors with simplified organic forms in her paintings to create expressionistic landscapes that evoke the essence of nature. Her landscapes, devoid of people or other representational forms, have a solitary quality, while her strong and intense colors express a range of emotions from tranquility, to ethereal dreamlike introspection, to turbulence. Like the work of Georgia O’Keefe, Laura captures the essence of landscapes through color and enjoys creating abstract patterns of simple organic shapes. Her early work used thin layers of acrylic paint to achieve a flatness in the landscapes and heighten the sense of distance and vastness between landforms. In later works, she added primers and successive layers of paint and glazes to build depth into natural objects. Her artwork, is evolving from a primary use of acrylic paints to include organic pigments created on location from natural materials (rocks, shells, earth, sand), as well as pieces of organic materials to add textures to her paintings.
Laura’s paintings reflect her deep appreciation for nature. Having worked for many years in environmental firms, she is committed to maintaining America’s natural landscapes. She donates a portion of all sales to a non-profit environmental organization to help protect and preserve these landscapes.
