Laura Newmark is a native Floridian and grew up by the sea. Part of her education took place in Switzerland and France, with a particular emphasis on the visual arts. Feeling a special affinity for India, Laura made Pondicherry her second home for a period of twenty years. While there, she designed and produced her own line of accessories and decorative homeware for international distribution.
In 1993 she was commissioned to create a tranquil indoor/outdoor area in Auroville, in the south of India, where the Dalai Lama could receive visitors. This assignment crystallized her interest in interior and garden design.
Returning to Florida, she continued her training. Since that time, she has successfully completed complex home renovation and landscaping projects, approaching them with an uncanny eye for volume and line and an intuitive sense of placement, texture and color.
In 2009, Laura met the artist Lynne Golob Gelfman. Under Lynne’s guidance and instruction, she turned to painting, a long-postponed pursuit, and began to develop a visual vocabulary through collage. From the outset, biodiversity and the living world invisible to the eye have been central to her work. In Laura’s recent pieces, vaguely biomorphic shapes float suspended in a primeval mist of color. Echoes of planetary, subaquatic and microscopic life coexist and inform one another, creating unique, multilayered virtual ecosystems by turns tranquil and intense. Reflecting the recurring patterns of nature, Laura’s collages leap beyond the mutual exclusion of order and chaos into a state of quietly dynamic equilibrium.
Laura now resides in Santa Fe New Mexico