ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Ross-Paul has been painting professionally for over four decades. During that time she has been represented by nine West-Coast rallies from Seattle to LA, with solo exhibits at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, The Column Gallery, Colorado College, Colorado: The Art Gym, Portland, Oregon; and important exhibits at the Arnot Museum, Elmira, New York; Palm Springs Art Museum,; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene), The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Portland), and The Schnitzer Family Collection.
Among her many awards, Ross-Paul has received the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship, an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Susan Cooley Gilliom Artist and Teaching Residency in Roseville, California. Her art has been singled out for prizes in regional biennials at the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museums, and Turtle Bay Museum in Redding, California; featured in the cable TV film Spy (1989); and appears on book covers including fiction by Charles Spaeth (2011) and Barbara Wilson (1993) and poetry by Judith Barrington (2015).
BIO
Born during a blizzard in 1950, Laura Ross-Paul spent much of her childhood gazing in wonder at the natural environment, or drawing and painting expressions of it and the intriguing people inhabiting it. She became the first in her family to attend college when her high school bundled up scholarships to send her, largely as a thank you for her yearbook illustrations. Laura's illustrations helped win the school a major national yearbook award.
Attending college in the late 1960's plunged Laura into the Viet Nam anti-war movement and Laura risked losing those precious scholarships when she anonymously illustrated a campus wide weekly newspaper opposed to the war. The success of the paper’s reach brought a revelation to Laura about the effectiveness of visual communication. After three years in a pre-nursing program, Laura switched into art, allowing her to become immersed in studio classes and subsequently landing a spot in Portland State’s newly created MFA program.
Even before graduation, Laura broke two glass ceilings. The first being when Laura’s thesis professor died and she was hired to teach his classes while the university conducted a search, making her one of PSU’s first ever women to teach an upper division studio class. This teaching launch led to a twenty-five year teaching career as an Associate Professor specializing in Figure Painting and Drawing at Portland State University, as well as classes at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, Marylhurst University, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Lewis and Clark College.
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