Laura Ross-Paul is a Portland based artist, teacher and arts cheerleader. She has been painting professionally for over four decades and has been represented by nine different galleries on the West Coast from Seattle to Laguna Beach. She has exhibited her work throughout the Pacific Northwest and California and New York in such venues as the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Arnot Museum (NY), the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Art Gym and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
Biography
Born during a blizzard in 1950, Laura Ross-Paul spent much of her childhood gazing in wonder at the natural environment, or drawing and painting expressions of it and the intriguing people inhabiting it. She became the first in her family to attend college when her high school bundled up scholarships to send her, largely as a thank you for her yearbook illustrations. Laura's illustrations helped win the school a major national yearbook award.
Attending college in the late 1960's plunged Laura into the Viet Nam anti-war movement and Laura risked losing those precious scholarships when she anonymously illustrated a campus wide weekly newspaper opposed to the war. The success of the paper’s reach brought a revelation to Laura about the effectiveness of visual communication. After three years in a pre-nursing program, Laura switched into art, allowing her to become immersed in studio classes and subsequently landing a spot in Portland State’s newly created MFA program.
Even before graduation, Laura broke two glass ceilings. The first being when Laura’s thesis professor died and she was hired to teach his classes while the university conducted a search, making her one of PSU’s first ever women to teach an upper division studio class. This teaching launch led to a twenty-five year teaching career as an Associate Professor specializing in Figure Painting and Drawing at Portland State University, as well as classes at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, Marylhurst University, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Lewis and Clark College.
The second glass ceiling was broken by joining Arlene Schnitzer’s prestigious Fountain Gallery only a few weeks after graduation, making Laura the only female PSU teacher to be represented by the gallery and the first among Laura’s artist peers to get gallery representation.
Laura has continued to be a gallery represented artist through present day, staying with Schnitzer until she closed the gallery in the late eighties, then joining the newly formed Elizabeth Leach gallery, and finally moving to Charles Froelick and Shannon Aldelhart's gallery when they opened in Portland in the late 90’s.
Her figurative paintings with mystical and psychologically compelling environments are in private and public collections throughout the United States. During her career, Laura has received an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Arts Fellowship, the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship and the Susan Cooly-Gillion Artist residency. Her work been awarded juror prizes in biennials at the Portland and Tacoma Art Museums as well as the latest West Coast Biennial at the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding California. A Hollywood feature cable TV film, “Spy”, built a character featuring her work, and she’s been honored by multiple writers asking to use her work on the covers of their books.
As an Associate Art Professor, she fostered the artistic talents of art students while teaching art at Portland State, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Lewis and Clark College, and the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, among others.
Laura has served on numerous boards and committees for local and regional art such as serving as a commissioner for Metropolitan Arts Council. In addition, she was a co-founder of Northwest Artist's Workshop and a committee member and curator for Portland’s fabled Portland Center for the Visual Arts (PCVA).
Ross-Paul is currently represented by Brian Marki Gallery in Palm Springs.
You can follow her work at: lauraross-paul.com, BrianMarkiGallery.com and on Instagram at Artgirlpdx
Artist Laura Ross-Paul.
In Seattle she’s been represented by Francine Sedars, Grover Thurston, and Pacini Lubel Gallery until it closed in 2006. In California, representation has been Jenkins Johnson in San Francisco, Jo Ann Artman in Laguna Beach and, currently, Brian Marki in Palm Springs.
Immediately out of grad school Laura became an Art Community activist, becoming a co-founder of the Northwest Artist Workshop, and serving on the boards and steering and executive committees of the PSU Alumni Association, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts (now OCAC), the prestigious and now legendary Portland Center for the Visual Arts (PCVA), ART/NET, Arts Plan 2000+ and finally serving as a Metropolitan Arts Commissioner (now RACC). This volunteerism slowed down when Laura and her husband had their third child.
Laura has long been known as a figurative artist whose mystical backgrounds link the figure to their environments in psychologically compelling ways and resulting in many museum and art center exhibits. Some highlights have been when curator John Weber recognized the innovation and maturity of Laura’s watercolor work on unsized mulberry paper and awarded her a one woman Northwest Viewpoints exhibit at the Portland Art Museum in 1988. Other highlights include Curators Terri Hopkins and Paul Sutenin’s early 1981-1990 retrospective, “A Decade of Painting” at Marylhurst College’s “Art Gym”; and curator Jessica Hunter-Larsen’s exhibit in 2007, “Laura Ross-Paul: The Allusive Self” at the Coburn Gallery, Colorado College, Colorado Springs. These and other exhibits have given curators and arts writers opportunities to write about her paintings, affirming her unique visual language.
Now retired from teaching, Laura is concentrating on her studio practice. While always incorporating new, innovative ways to use artist materials to enhance both the interpretive look and visual read of her work, she is especially enjoying her recent breakthroughs of archivally combining her two painting medium loves, watercolor and oil.
Laura and her writer husband Alex, have work-spaces in their Portland home and Manzanita beach cabin where she spends time in both nature and in her studio, where she paints nearly every day.