The Artist

Laurie Sverdlove at work
Photo by: Dian Parker

I was fortunate to grow up in New York City with a world of great art easily accessible.  As a teenager I studied at the Art Students League and spent my free time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Museum.  Summers offered a different and equally compelling world.  For ten weeks every summer my family lived in a small Adirondack cabin.  There were few organized activities and from a very early age I was free to roam woods and rural lanes collecting plant specimens and learning their names.

This duality of city and country has continued to enrich my life.  I lived for many years in the Bay Area where I earned my MFA at UC Berkeley and spent a decade  working at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens.  For three years I lived in the rural outskirts of Pune, India absorbing a new landscape and studying Indian miniature paintings.

2018, Cosmic Quantum 4, oil on canvas, 36 x 38

I now live in rural Vermont and, as life would have it, spend little time painting what is right outside my studio.  But, of course, everything is in there someplace!