Ciao! I’m Laura and I hope you liked my gallery!
In my life, I always associated painting with private time, relax, and recharge.
My journey sprouted out of nowhere when I was in elementary school. I had grown really quickly and reached a point where I was not only the tallest between my classmates but most of my teachers as well. This proved to be a problem for my social life just as much as my health, I developed a sickness called Osgood-Schlatter, an issue of calcification in my knees. This prevented me from doing any type of activity, and sometimes, made it impossible to even use the stairs.
My mum quickly noticed that not being able to play sports was not doing me any good and decided to send me to a painter’s study. He wasn’t really a teacher, some days we would not even speak, but he put a brush in my right hand and cardboard in the other, and after my first oil painting was complete, I could not stop. Growing up I although started to notice the stigma behind painting and drifted from it.
Getting back into it was a long process, during university I would complete a painting after every exam, it was my escape, my safe space. The big jump was although a couple of years later when my now husband, Fabio, gifted me a tripod a couple of canvases and what to me seemed like way too many colors. This was also when I started to work which meant that paintings would stay on the tripod sometimes for months before I was able to finish them.
The following year Fabio, still pushing for me to paint, gifted me a watercolor course on the Navigli of Milan. I loved leaving the house and having a few hours to myself while the four girls were home. After the course, I straight away went back to oil painting, and in the new house, I had a corner all for myself and kept painting, slowly but constantly.
Once we moved to Singapore, I had some more free time and Fabio found an atelier for me to go to two hours a week. This place was not structured at all, but it allowed me to try new things and learn very quickly. At this point, the paintings kept increasing and improving in quality. Fabio always believed more in me than I believed in myself, and he started insisting that we put the paintings up around the house, originally, I was against it, but with time the walls started filling up. And now every time I walk into my home, I feel a flow of energy rushing in my body.
Up to this point, my favorite paintings are the Vietnamese women and the Buddhas, they are very similar but different from each other and by putting them one next to each other I can feel my emotions when I painted them and also see my improvement.
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