Artist Detail

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Laura Callin Bennett

Visual Artist

About the artist: I am a painter who is interested in evolution, biodiversity, genetic engineering, and artificial breeding.

I think evolution is beautiful. It gives elegant explanations for why animals look and act the way they do. I am working on a series of one hundred small paintings that explore the idea of evolution in a playful way. They are all the same size, four inches by six inches.

I think of the paintings as little organisms that are all related to one another. Because they are related they have certain things in common, including India ink outlines and acrylic paint in a particular range of colors. If you look at a bird-watching field guide, you can see that related birds often have the same colors, just rearranged into different patterns. That is because they all inherited their colors from a common ancestor. A systematic, limited palette of colors gives the same kind of unity to my population of paintings.

Whenever I want to create a new painting, I start by looking at two of my earlier paintings side by side. I imaginatively combine their ideas, designs, and colors as I make a new “hybrid” offspring painting. Some of the designs that recur throughout my work are images of rabbits, birds, and women. Rabbits represent domesticity, comfort, and a certain childlike innocence. The women are self-portraits or alter egos; I draw them when I am in an introspective mood. Birds appear because they are the most visible creatures in my environment. Most mammals stay hidden, but it only takes a short walk around my apartment complex to see white-crowned sparrows, mourning doves, scrub jays, and more. In my painting series I am taking in all of these ideas, processing and reworking them, and watching as new and interesting forms evolve.