Villers Abbey Forest Painting

Laura K. Smith (1989) is a Canadian-born landscape painter based near Antwerp, Belgium. From a young age, Laura drew and painted with her grandfather (‘Opa’) and was inspired by the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art movements she learned about in school. In Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, Laura studied Studio Fine Arts, Art History, and Art Theory, and earned a Ph.D. in Literature in 2018. Laura has worked in academia and as an art consultant, gallery assistant, and researcher, for internationally renowned art institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum and Colnaghi, the first commercial art gallery in the world. She is now pursuing her own painting practice professionally. Peaceful, joyful, strong, colourful, dream-like, and haunting are some of the ways in which Laura’s paintings have been described. Using acrylic on canvas, Laura paints colourful landscape scenes of her home country of Canada and her new home country of Belgium with the aim of sharing the joy that she experiences in the practice and appreciation of art. More recently, Laura has started working in watercolour. Complementary to her painting practice, Laura writes about her process and inspiration in her blog, available on her website.