Wooten earned her undergraduate degree in Art and Architecture at the University of Virginia and continued on at UVA as an Aunspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Studio Art before earning her MFA from American University. During graduate school, she attended a summer program in Perugia, Italy, at the Accademia de Belle Arti Pietro Vannucci, where the panoramic Mediterranean landscape took hold of her imagination. Wooten’s landscape paintings have been exhibited across the East Coast, including juried exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware, the Bowery Gallery in New York City and the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Boston. Recent solo exhibitions in Charlottesville include “Spirit of Place: Landscapes Real & Imagined” at Chroma Projects in 2019 and “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery in 2020/21.

My current work reflects my interest in painting the landscape of my daily experience: the fields and meadows of central Virginia, views to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains from my hilltop neighborhood, and the way trees mark the passing of time in my own backyard. My paintings explore the places they represent, as well as the inner landscape of my experience and how it might be shared. Color, shape, and mark fall in service to the perception of an emotional presence in the land that is both highly personal and universally human. The landscape painting becomes a mirror into our own histories, reveries, and associations. 

Quantum Observations

Laura Wooten Artist Talk