Artist Focus: Laura Thipphawong

At the edge of the story: portals, fairy tales and feelings you can’t quite name

Some paintings feel like windows, but Laura Thipphawong’s feel like portals, which you don’t so much look at as wander through. Her worlds are lush with colour and detail, full of women caught mid-transformation, animals growing out of human limbs and landscapes that are half forest and half dream. At first the scenes seem playful, and then you notice the teeth, the talons, the lava and the shadows. She draws on nature, folklore and symbol, yet the compositions are entirely her own, dense and unexpected and full of a stillness that suggests something is about to happen.

Standing in front of one, you can tell there is a big, layered story underneath, partly personal, partly researched and partly something in between, and the works we show at Curio Atelier all seem to belong to the same universe: surreal narrative oil paintings full of symbolism and psychological depth, yet open enough for you to bring your own reading to them.

The self-taught painter and the researcher, working together

Laura has been teaching herself to paint since she was twelve, but that is only half the story; the other half is academic, built on art history, critical theory and the kind of reading that leaves pencil notes all over the margins. Her path hasn’t been straight. She showed in galleries as a teenager and exhibited in Toronto in her early twenties, but didn’t go to OCAD until she was 29, and when she did it was to study critical and cultural theory rather than painting. She had already learned to paint from books and from trial and error, and school gave her room to study history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, literature and media, all of which now feeds back into her paintings.

“The self-taught part of me and the formally educated researcher part of me are still working together,” she says, now more productively than ever. You can see that partnership in the work, the intuitive maker and the careful researcher each nudging the other along.

How a painting begins: a recurring thought, then a scene

Laura describes her work as “surreal, narrative oil paintings steeped in research and symbolism,” and that is exactly how they behave. A painting rarely starts with a finished story. Instead she notices an image, phrase or idea that keeps coming back and sits with it until it forms a scene that “feels just somehow right,” and only then does she research the history or theory behind the images she has gathered, adding more symbols if the meaning resonates and paring back if it doesn’t. Sometimes it is more direct, a few emblematic objects put together to mark something that happened to her. Each painting is part psychology and part composition, a place to think where fairy tales, horror films, theory and lived experience sit side by side.

Safety, danger and the moment before something happens

Many of Laura’s compositions are built on a tension: predator and prey, beauty and the grotesque, human and animal, body and surroundings. The pair she returns to most is safety and danger.

She has thought about that pairing since childhood, and wrote her thesis on horror as an art form and the cultural forces behind it. You can see it plainly in A Dangerous Game, where girls sit above a floor of lava: flirting with risk, and treating fear as part of life rather than something to avoid at all costs.

People often say her paintings feel like “the stillness right before something is about to happen”, and she loves that. Being on the edge of a decision, a transformation or a revelation is exactly where she wants to stay.

She isn’t after simple feelings. She’s drawn to states that are mixed and even contradictory, the “I’m not sure what this is, but I feel it” moments. She wants to name those feelings without flattening them. If she paints them honestly, she trusts viewers will feel something too, even if they can’t say exactly what.

Human, animal and the uncanny in between

One of the most striking things in Laura’s work is how bodies behave. Human and animal forms are often caught mid-change: a hand turning into an eagle’s talons, a woman crouched on frog-like legs, features that seem normal until you look a little longer.

She traces this back to fairy tales and folklore, where people turn into animals in the face of trauma or danger. To her, those stories work as pictures of dissociation, of not quite recognising yourself.

The strangeness is entirely deliberate, and she knows a figure is right when the painted body matches how the feeling sits in her own body. A reaching hand has to look strained. A crouching woman needs legs and a spine just a little too long. At first you see a girl and an animal. Look longer and you realise every limb has been altered to carry a deeper state of mind.

Some symbols are intensely personal. For a while a character she called “Ghosty Boy” kept appearing in her drawings and paintings. He stands for her brother, who was stillborn less than a year before she was born. Laura grew up in a grieving family, and this person who never lived still feels strangely close.

“It’s complicated,” she says. “I wish I knew him, but if he had lived, I wouldn’t have been born.” That knot, loving someone whose death made your life possible, sits under many of her images.

Paintings as portals and companions

When a work leaves her studio for someone’s home, Laura hopes it changes the feel of the room. “I hope it creates an otherworldly, cerebral atmosphere,” she says, and ideally people want to spend time with the image and almost step into it, as if through a portal. That is exactly how her paintings behave for us: they don’t just sit above a sofa, they pull you into looking longer than you meant to, and you notice new connections every time.

Sometimes a collector’s reading shows her the work in a new light. Recently she painted a woman turning into a frog, rooted in fairy-tale motifs and personal experience. The collector who bought it sees it as a “cosmic interplay among humans and nature, and of time, memory, and grief.” That was close to what she had in mind, but hearing it put so fully made the painting feel as if it wasn’t only hers anymore, in a good way. It had become shared, carrying meanings she couldn’t have planned alone.

What comes next

The works at Curio Atelier all feel like they come from the same universe: natural elements that read like symbols pulled up from the subconscious, in compositions that keep revealing new details.

For the next chapter, Laura sees herself moving further into narrative and figurative work. After a stretch of more emblematic imagery, she’s returning to something more personal and story-led: women exploring strange worlds, painted in a raw, organic and still magical way.

She calls it “controlled maximalism”: compositions full of detail but held together with intention. There’s more fun and joy in the new images, mixed with personal story she had recently set aside. She thinks it may be her best work yet, and she’s having a great time making it.

That’s one of the most exciting things about Laura’s practice for us. The paintings are serious, researched and emotionally complex, and they still leave room for play, curiosity and the pleasure of getting lost in an image. In your own living room, they can make you feel you’re standing at the door of another world, a little frightening, a little funny, and entirely alive. See her available work on her artist page.