Painter Laura Straus

Poppy (2025), 30″H x 22″W, India ink and gouache on Fabriano paper.

Spring (2025), 30″H x 22″W, India ink, gouache, acrylic, and watercolor on Fabriano paper.

Stellar (2025), 30″H x 22″W, gouache and acrylic on Fabriano paper.

Stellar (2025), 30″H x 22″W, gouache and acrylic on Fabriano paper.

Starry Night (2025), 22”H x 30”W, India ink on Fabriano paper.

Thistle (2024), 22”H x 30”W, India ink and acrylic on Fabriano paper.

Artist Laura Straus.

About eight years ago, Laura Straus was simultaneously commuting to a job in New York, running a nonprofit, and heading up her local chamber of commerce. It was a lot.

While out hiking with her dog, she tripped over some beech roots and aggravated an old ankle injury, which immobilized her for a year. This forced her to sit with herself and think about what she truly wanted to do, and she realized she had to get back to painting.

Straus had grown up in a renowned publishing family; Isaac Bashevis Singer read her bedtime stories. Her great joy was a summer arts camp called Buck’s Rock in New Milford, where she explored ceramics, weaving, painting, jewelry, and sculpture. At Wesleyan University, in Middletown, she bonded with a professor who got students out of their heads with a series of thirty-second, forty-five-second, and sixty-second warm-up drawings. It was a way of outrunning the critical mind and letting the hand take the lead.

For her thesis, at this professor’s direction, she painted one subject over and over again: the onion. This taught her how to represent an object but also discover its essence. When she graduated, she wanted to be a painter, but life got in the way. She worked at a photo agency, at a publisher, and as a photographer, and decades passed.

But now that she was injured, Straus painted every day and devised a set of techniques that fit with her enforced stasis. She worked relatively small—no wall-sized canvases—and leaned on her two lifelong obsessions: handmade Fabriano paper and Matisse. Using the paper as her base, she affixed cutouts of painter’s tape to create white spaces under color-saturated explosions of India ink. She then added details and layers with watercolor, gouache, oil, and acrylic. The results were—and are—rare, dynamic blends of representation and abstraction, quick gestures and exacting detail.

During Covid, Straus and her husband moved to seven acres on a former dairy farm in Roxbury, which she is slowly converting to native plants, many of which inspire her paintings. She also discovered they are one town away from the place that first lit her artistic fire, Buck’s Rock Camp. Sometimes, she says, “you need
to go back to go forward. I feel like I’m doing what I’ve been wanting to do for my whole life.”

Editor’s Note: Laura Straus is represented by The Little Plucky, New Canaan, thelittleplucky.com. To see more of her work, visit laurastraus.com.