Pickering’s Laura Warburton paints big ideas

(My profile of Laura in the Pickering/Ajax News Advertiser)

Not only has artist, Laura Warburton turned the family dining room in her Pickering home into a studio, but her large-scale works on canvas (some as large as 8 feet by 4 feet) now dominate most of the walls in the common living quarters she shares with partner, Jon Blacker (a professional photographer) and 12-year-old son, Eamon. The self-taught Warburton covers her canvases with swirls and splashes of acrylic paint and watercolours, and maybe sand, molding paste, or sometimes collage images and stenciled words. To provide some insight into what her approach is to making art, on her web site, the artist declares that “a composition is merely a vague idea, not fully envisioned, until the piece itself emerges with the artist's assistance.”

Warburton acknowledges early influence from her mother, an abstract painter of some renown in the Unionville area where Laura got her primary and secondary education. But she only began painting after many years of working in sports and occupational therapy practice, teaching and management, following studies for a psychology degree at the University of Waterloo. She bought a canvas and made her first painting in 1991, but has only been painting seriously for the past 5 years, after her son had matured to the point where she really had the time and energy to devote to it. And she has plunged right into art making with a vengeance, participating in group exhibitions at numerous galleries, submitting to juried shows, having work purchased by private collectors and participating in the fledgling Durham West Art Studio Tour.

Warburton has made great strides in her development in a very short space of time, moving into increasingly brighter and lighter imagery, introducing subtly emerging figurative shapes into some of her abstracts and considering getting some training in metal work so as to be able to make sculptural relief wall works. All while holding down a position as a pharmaceutical sales rep, working from her home and covering Durham Region and eastern Scarborough.

See Warburton’s works for yourself when she throws open her studio/dining room doors at 1980 Lodge Road as part of the DWAC Tour, set to take place on the weekend of October 2nd and 3rd; or go to her site at www.laurawarburton.com