Loralee Grace
About the Artist
Loralee Grace is a visual artist whose work is shaped by travel, culture, landscape and environmental awareness. Throughout her twenties, she traveled extensively, living and working across 27 countries on five continents. Those experiences became an important foundation for her creative practice and continue to influence the places, patterns and stories that appear in her work.
Contemporary Artist & Visual Painter
Born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Loralee developed an early connection to nature through family camping trips and time spent exploring national parks. She later earned her BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design, where her thesis focused on environmental concerns, a subject that remains central to her work today.
Her paintings often combine landscape imagery with cultural patterns, memory and symbolism, reflecting both the beauty of the places she has experienced and her ongoing interest in the relationship between people and the natural world.
Artist Statement
Futurelands is a series of travel-inspired paintings celebrating landscapes and cultures around the globe.
While studying these patterns during my four nomadic years abroad, I learned how much the local landscapes inspire the colors and shapes of these designs. I also discovered how much symbolism, story, cultural and spiritual significance is woven in. Environmental concepts are subtly integrated by adding futuristic air-filtration suits or apparatuses to any present figures and animals. The wide range of emotions experienced during my travel experiences are present in every painting as well. My process involves initial plein air sketching and watercolor painting on location, followed by in-studio work using reference photos I took on site.
Working in oils, I start by painting the sky, and loosely blocking-in the landscape. While choosing a landscape reference photo, I also search through my photos of patterns, textiles and weavings I saw in the country to see what pairs best. I also research at a local library or online for further inspiration and information about the cultural meaning of the pattern. I then hand-draw the patterns on a transparent paper overtop of the canvas, to work out the struggle of aligning the pattern’s size and composition in relation to the landscape. I complete this process on a see-through paper over-top to avoid gummying up the canvas with the excess of graphite drawing and erasing. This process usually involves more math than I prefer to do. Once I get all the kinks out on the tracing paper, I transfer the pattern onto the canvas to painstakingly paint by hand. Lastly, I finish painting the landscape! Each painting is a journey back in time for me to the location and emotional experiences of my exhilarating nomadic years.
