With a nod to Shakespeare, we can readily count the ways we love Laura Shubert’s light-and energy-filled paintings. We admire her deft way of capturing luminosity as it plays off her subjects. We smile at her choice of subject: waiters, caught mid-torso, bearing bottles of wine; the sun-dappled façade of a Provencal house; a leggy pre-adolescent cartwheeling on the beach, bathed in sunshine. Her paintings are highly evolved, yet convey the ordinary elements of every day life.
We are in awe of her painterly technique, which is rich, loose and spontaneous. Shubert paints in a strong and defined bravura style that catches the movement and the moment. Her use of paint has been compared to the pleasure of a dessert chef spreading frosting on a cake and, indeed, her paintings “convey a sense of well-being, of the good life and of deep and quiet pleasures.” (James R. Nelson, Birmingham News).
Shubert is masterful at surrendering the details of her subject, but never the descriptive content. Her brush and palette knife work has been compared to that Edouard Manet and Wayne Thiebaud
Shubert, the daughter of a Basque father and an American mother, grew up in Florida and Spain and chose art as a career at an early age. She studied painting, drawing and printmaking at Southern Methodist University. After studying painting at the Academie Port Royal, Paris, she began exhibiting in the United States. In 2000, she was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London. Her work is found in both private and corporate collections around the United States and abroad.
Our favorite review of her work comes from James Nelson of the Birmingham News. He wrote “(Shubert’s) paintings are simple, direct, rich and lush. As visual panaceas, they demand little from the viewer and offer a quiet haven for the stressed.” We couldn’t agree more.
