LAURA GAY SHER is a Seattle painter whose love of color and the outdoors began as a young child growing up in the Midwest.
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LEARNING: Transmission of wisdom is a theme found in both Sher’s art and life. Her parents, teachers, and mentors nurtured her aptitude for drawing and painting throughout her childhood. After leaving high school early, she first studied at the University of Missouri and Montana State University, where a professor encouraged her to change her major from geology to painting. Sher then began classical and formal studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, ultimately earning her BFA with Distinction from Webster University in St. Louis. While pursuing her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Sher transitioned from oils to acrylics, developing new techniques to make the acrylic paint behave more like oils.
TEACHING: Sher began her teaching career at a small private school in Seattle before earning an M.Ed. from Western Washington University to align with her deeply held belief in the power and importance of public education. For over 25 years, she taught a new generation of art students. In guiding others, she found a steady life path until she retired early from teaching to paint full-time.
DUALITIES: Her paintings offer new takes on the classical landscape. Sher’s labor as primary caregiver to her dying sister cemented her long-standing contemplation of the world in flux. The viewer often finds the enduring earth under both crescent moons, emblems of constant change, and full moons shining steadfast and solid. This paradoxical conjunction evokes our human desire for guardianship over the cycle of birth, striving, and death.
CHAOS AND TRANSFORMATION: Sher has survived cancer, a brain aneurysm, deaths of loved ones, marriages, and the challenges of high school teaching. Today, her peaceful works tend to study the transforming effects of chaos. Fluid, kinetic elements express themes of fear, pain and loss, and healing; whirling crescents cut through landscapes as swirling unknowns, birds or scalpels or scythes. Yet the abiding stillness of the earth below speaks of the beauty of acceptance and the rhythm of continuity. As the viewer tries to connect with something deeply familiar yet mysterious in the otherworldly landscape, her work evokes a sense of calm.
SHER is an artist who has navigated the impacts of catastrophic change and abides in its wisdom. When she is not painting, she can be found with friends and her black lab, Annie, hiking the beautiful forests, mountains, and beaches of the Pacific Northwest.
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-SLS, April, 2025