Shrubland Vista

Lauren Forcella is an award-winning California artist with 30 years of experience. If art was writing, Forcella’s style would be called magical realism. Her paintings are love letters to this beautiful planet—which to her is magic. An impressionist and fauvist, in the art world, her unworked style is called direct painting, or au premier coup. Using a bold palette of classic oils, Forcella works wet on wet and lays the paint on thick so the emotions of her subject come through the brushstrokes as well as the color. A translator for Mother Earth, Forcella grew up screen-free and immersed in nature near Weaverville, California, learning to backpack as a child in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. To say that nature saved her is no exaggeration and she knew at age 14 that she would work for the Earth. To that end, Forcella first became a hydrogeologist which proved riddled with politics. Painting arrived without warning in the midst of raising her four amazing children. It arrived as an already-developed skill—a surreal experience—and she knew with the first painting that she'd found the real path.