Laura Wilkins
Laura Wilkins (b. 1991, Romania) is a fine artist based in New Mexico, working primarily in oils and watercolors, utilizing vibrant, colorful, shape-dominated paintings to explore the beauty of the built and natural worlds.
Laura is a painter driven by an insatiable curiosity for the natural world—its colors, textures, and ever-shifting forms. From an early age, she immersed herself in artistic exploration, experimenting with styles and techniques, with a strong foundation in realism. Her early works, sketched in charcoal and graphite, captured scenes pulled directly from everyday life.
Though she pursued a degree in psychology at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Laura soon discovered that her true calling wasn’t in studying the human mind—it was in expressing it through art. That realization marked a turning point.
For the past six years, her evocative paintings have found homes around the globe in the collections of private art lovers. Now based in New Mexico, Laura continues to create from the heart of her home studio, where the desert light and expansive skies fuel her imagination.
Artist Statement
In 2019, I returned to my watercolor brushes and began painting birds—creatures that had become symbolic companions on my journey. Their flight echoed my own path of migration over the past decade, reflecting a deep longing for change, exploration, and the freedom to move through unfamiliar worlds.
As I traveled across continents, each bird I painted became a visual diary entry—capturing moments of discovery, resilience, and transformation. They were more than just subjects; they were metaphors for my shifting identity, always in motion, always seeking.
But as time passed, something within me began to settle.
My travels led me to spaces with a deeper sense of permanence—cities layered with history, landscapes rooted in culture and memory. And with that shift came a new artistic focus. Where once I painted wings in motion, I now find inspiration in the stillness of place: in the texture of stone walls, the geometry of rooftops, the quiet drama of light cascading across a cityscape.
My work now explores the balance between movement and grounding, between the desire to roam and the comfort of belonging. There’s a quiet joy in capturing the details of a lived-in space—its structure, its shadows, its stories.
Through this evolution, I’ve come to see that the journey and the destination are not separate—they inform and enrich each other. And my art continues to explore that delicate, beautiful intersection.