Laurie Tuchel

Laurie is an American artist who divides her time between adopted homes on Grand Bahama Island and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Interested in landscapes as well as the human figure, Laurie is drawn to exploring people’s stories through their relationship to time and place within their natural environment. She interprets her subjects through vivid colour and bold brushwork. Her choice of a closely cropped composition is a hallmark of her work, as is her desire to capture a sense of wherever is home at the time. Her interest in not in accuracy or proportions but in catching a fleeting sense of the multiplicity of lived experiences that she finds around her. Strong colour and simplified form is used to convey a deep interest in human emotion. Primarily an oil painter, she has also begun taking her work into the craft of needlepoint.

She is an avid traveler who has filled sketchbooks with impressions that begin as visual field notes - recordings of emotional and visual responses through Plein Air. They incorporate collage and mixed media, whatever it takes to gather information.  Back in the studio, these interpretations become the intuitive foundation for future paintings.

Laurie is equally interested in creating works of art that tell the stories of her island, Grand Bahama, to its community, which has limited exposure to the power of visual art and its storytelling abilities. She is the inspiration behind a collaborative ongoing series highlighting the island’s unique history. Through her own work and those of other island artists, Grand Bahama’s heritage is being showcased in new ways. 

Her work has been exhibited and collected since 2014.