Laurie Koss


Laurie was born and raised in Vancouver, B.C. She developed a love and appreciation of art at a young age from her mother, Mary Eagle, who is also an artist.Initially a self-taught photographer, she had her first darkroom at the age of seventeen.She went on to win the grand prize in two photo contests and continues to have a love and fascination with photography today.She definitely credits her background in photography as an influence in her current work.
Following high school, Laurie studied commercial art at Capilano College in North Vancouver where she became very interested in colour – especially the mixing of tertiary and quaternary colours – and studied it extensively.This interest in colour is something she definitely credits as another influence in her current work.Following a number of years working as a commercial artist and an art director in the advertising field, she continued her education at the University of British Columbia.In 1990, she was awarded the Brissenden Scholarship in Art Education and graduated having earned a Bachelor of Education with a major in art.
It was during the five years she spent at UBC that Laurie developed an interest in acrylic painting as well as a fascination with light and form in black and white macro photography.She primarily explored the subject of flowers during her art studies which included such areas of art as painting, graphics, photography, ceramics, and textile design.It was her love of photography, however, that eventually led her, in her fifth year at UBC, to a one-on-one photography course with graphic artist, Bob Steele.Bob taught her, during that time, something that she definitely credits as the most major influence in her current work.He taught her that it is much easier to take a good colour photograph, but that once you remove the colour and shoot in black and white you have to rely on the shape, form, light and dark, and movement to make it beautiful; consequently, it is much more challenging to produce a beautiful black and white photograph.It is this same idea that she is exploring in her current painting collection: “Is a flower still beautiful without its colour?”
After teaching high school art for a couple of years, and then relocating to Kelowna, Laurie spent the next several years devoted to being a wife and mother and spending only a very limited amount of time in her studio.Laurie and her husband, Mike, have two children, Sarah and James.Once her youngest child was in school full time, she returned to painting and is enjoying working on large canvases using her own black and white photographic images as a source of inspiration.Instead of relying on a flower’s most beautiful feature, its colour, her paintings become a more intense study of natural form, light and movement.She creates the neutral tones of her paintings as she works by mixing the paint on a simple palette of the three primary colours – red, yellow, and blue – and white.