Featured Artist: Laura Winter’s Enchanted Botanical and Animal Paintings

It is in the thinnest layers that precious things are hidden,” Italian artist Laura Winter says. “The casing of a flower that lets its interior shine through, the filigree of a dry leaf, the wings of a moth.” We’ve long admired her delicate watercolors, oil paintings, and painted porcelain, with their scenes of blooming flowers and cascading leaves, of sweet birds and bats and cats and foxes, of gleaming, dropping fruit. It’s all so lovely. Winter likes to combine botanical and animal elements in harmonious compositions, she says: “A sinuous curve, a light shade of color that turns into its complementary color, the two blending together to form unique nuances in a tonal balance. This balance cheers the soul, rests and delights the eyes.” That’s what her art is—restful. As restful and soothing as it is beautiful.

Winter has a weakness for detail and intricate things. She uses different techniques that she believes shines through in each one of them. In ink illustration, she likes to create subtle textures through “hatching”: The lines blend like spiderwebs until they form a certain shape, she explains. “Through them you can discover different shapes. It’s like a microworld that creates itself, helped by the touch of the pen.” In oil painting, she’s most fascinated by color and the layering of colors—the magical “glazes” from Flemish painting that form unique atmospheres and from whose overlapping you can achieve unique shades sometimes impossible to create otherwise. For her, painting on porcelain is a mix of all this: “You can decide to have sharper lines, but you can also use colors with a more liquid consistency, creating veils of color that make the shapes as a whole more delicate and ethereal.”

She’s constantly inspired by a search for beauty, and “every object or natural element represents a world to discover and from which to draw a lot of inspiration.” You just have to know how to look, she says, and how to “observe deeply through and in things.”

See more of Laura Winter’s work on Instagram @laurawinterart.