Laurie Bedard

I am a Canadian emerging visual artist based in Quebec. I came to painting later in life, at 57, without a traditional fine arts background. What began as an intuitive and deeply personal creative practice quickly became something much larger: a new language through which I could explore colour, movement, memory and emotion.

My professional life has largely been spent working with people—as an educator, counsellor and writer—and I think that history inevitably finds its way into my paintings. I am fascinated by what exists beneath the surface: the traces we carry, what is revealed and concealed, and the way experiences accumulate over time.

I work primarily in acrylic and mixed media, using layers of paint, glazes, texture, scraping and spontaneous mark-making. I am particularly drawn to the meeting place between abstraction and representation, where an image can feel recognizable without being fully explained.

I paint intuitively rather than beginning with a predetermined outcome. Each layer becomes a conversation with the one beneath it, and I often preserve unexpected marks, fractures and imperfections rather than correcting them. Increasingly, I have come to see these moments as part of the visual language of my work.

Paint...

Self-taught artist. My practice developed through independent exploration of acrylic and mixed-media techniques, with an emphasis on layering, texture, glazing, colour and intuitive mark-making.