Biography
Laurie MacFayden attended high school in Barrie, Ont., graduating with honours from Barrie North Collegiate in 1975. She earned a Print Journalism diploma from Georgian College, where she was awarded two bursaries, graduated on the Dean's List, and was named female athlete of the year in 1977. A painter, photographer, poet and avid traveller, Laurie is a member of the Visual Arts Alberta Association, the Writers Guild of Alberta, and the Raving Poets.
Artist’s Statement
I’m a poet and painter who’s endlessly fascinated with the visual arts. Largely self-taught, I discovered watercolours and acrylics in high school, but set the palette aside for two decades while pursuing a career in print journalism. In the mid-1990s I rediscovered my passion for throwing paint around.
Growing up in Barrie, Ont., I was keenly influenced by hikes through the woodlands and marshes of Simcoe County with my father Clifford, a painter and avid birdwatcher, as well as family outings to the AGO in Toronto and the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ont. Works by Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Mark Rothko make me feel great and small at the same time.
I work mostly in acrylics, and my landscape style might be described as Impressionism meets the Group of Seven. I’ve been told there’s a joyous, unfettered quality to my abstract-expressionist work that borders on reckless abandon; it pleases me to hear that because I never was very good at staying inside the lines.
“The whole point of making art is to touch the heart.
It should have breath and a pulse.
Whether it invokes feelings of joy, love, beauty,
sorrow, despair, even moral outrage...
art should make you feel something.”
