About The Artist
About Lauren Forcella
IF YOU CAN REMEMBER how you lost track of time when you were a child of 8-10 years, psychologists say those activities hold the key to your happiness as an adult. Lauren’s early years was all about art, writing, and especially, being in nature, and she eventually gravitated back to all three. But first “life” had to happen. It wasn’t until after the Geology degree, the hydrogeology career, the scientific publications, the environmental whistleblowing, after the Four Amazing Kids were born, the Master’s Degree in Consciousness Studies was earned, after the children’s book about the elements of the natural world was written (Lauren being mostly a writer by then), that the leader of Lauren’s writing group began bugging her incessantly to attend an art group called Wild Carrots. Finally she said, “You could create the images for your book,” and Lauren thought, hmm, maybe I could paint some cool “first-grader” art…
“I was immersed in the flow of raising four fantastic kids, when I first stepped into an art studio and discovered the meaning of the word “talent”. People are surprised that I’m self-taught, but you can hardly call it that. I can’t emphasize how surreal the onset was; painting arrived as an already-developed skill that continues to astonish. I guess that’s what talent is. Yes, you can develop it, but you don’t necessarily have to earn it to begin with.”
Weeks after this “discovery”, Lauren and her family relocated to New Hampshire where Cindy, a new friend, after seeing her paintings from Wild Carrots, went straight out and rented an art studio for Lauren, surprising her with the keys two days later. That decade, while raising the kids, getting a 3rd-degree black belt in Taekwondo and taking gold in three national sparring championships, Lauren created nearly 100 paintings.
Writing took hold again when Lauren founded the syndicated “Straight Talk Advice” column [2004-2016] carried in 24 newspapers nationally. As the column grew and gained critical acclaim, the paintings stopped flying off the easel and eventually stopped even being painted. All that has changed and Art is back!
“I loved writing the Straight Talk Advice.org column. Working with all the teen panelists and making such a direct difference in the world was the thrill of a lifetime. That said, my nervous system is soo glad to be painting again. I feel like I’m home after a long, somewhat exhausting journey.”
Since early on, Lauren has been innately drawn to several different painting styles: impressionistic landscapes, museum-quality florals, mixed-media dreamscapes, and abstract expressions. Currently she is focused on contemporary impressionistic landscapes in oils. Read more….
SPECIAL THANKS to Linda, my writing teacher in Point Reyes, California, who finally got me to Wild Carrots, Cynthia Hartman Mussat for the keys to my first studio in Wilton, New Hampshire, Barbara Kaufman, my early art agent in Los Angeles who believed in me enough to scan 60 of my early paintings on an enormous Cruise Scanner, R.W. for building out one of my trickier art studios in Sebastopol, California, along with my ingenious cart system, both almost entirely for the love of art, Brandan Topham in Oregon for creating one of my early websites out of the kindness of his dad’s heart (helped along by a hydrogeology flashback), Chris Nadler, my current website angle and genius, my mom for hanging framed photocopies of my early paintings all over her house and being “amazed” (this is actually illegal, only Moms can do this), my kids for being proud of me back in the beginning, which only made me want to paint more, my brother Jim and sister-in-law Janette for being my early “Theos”, my brother Tom and sister-in-law Wendy for their generous artist in residency, and to each person who’s ever bought art from me, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I wouldn’t be here without each of you. —Love, Lauren