Biography
Laura Shepard was ten years old when she won a poster contest for the county of Hampshire in the south of England; the prize was a set of oil paints. This was not the beginning of her art career however, for her earliest memories are all about drawing with pencils her dad sharpened with a knife on stacks of used office paper he’d bring home from work. Art was a priority with her parents, and they planned vacations around visiting the great art museums of the world in London, Paris, Madrid, Florence, Rome, and New York City. Her dad was an aeronautical engineer by day and an oil painter by night, on weekends, and holidays.
Until Laura left home for college, she spent her evenings side by side with him at the dining table doing homework while he painted. The only A+ earned during her college years was for an essay she wrote about him entitled “Through an Artist’s Eye.”
She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Davis and a masters degree from the University of Northern Colorado and was a full-time student at the Art Students League of Denver for five years, in addition to taking workshops and traveling abroad with fellow artists. She currently lives just north of Nashville, Tennessee, and continue to hone her skills through workshops, critiques, conferences, and weekly open studios. Laura is a member of Oil Painters of America, the Portrait Society of America, the Cecilia Beaux Forum, and the Chestnut Group, Plein Air Painters for the Land.
