In keeping with the Hofmann tradition of pushing and pulling a two-dimensional surface, I make paintings that have an energy, a kind of animus that goes from my mind and heart through my hand with a brush loaded with oil paint and pigment sticks.

The foundation of my art is drawing with charcoal from a model with a group of like-minded people who meet weekly. Like a short story is for a novelist, these drawings are in themselves complete and are the fodder for works on canvas, wood, and paper. Another part of my art is to teach people who are ready to paint and draw after a lifetime of careers, children, making money, making choices, waiting. This is their time and I am their portal into a world of art by sticking a piece of charcoal in their hands and saying “GO!”

Laura Shabott knew she was going to be an artist the first time she walked into the Yale Art Gallery, accessible by bus from her parents’ home in North Haven, Connecticut. She attended the Educational Center for Arts at thirteen and Parsons School of Design at seventeen. Personal circumstances kept her from completing a degree in art until 1995 when Shabott received a Studio Diploma from the SMFA at TUFTS in Boston. Concurrently, she discovered Provincetown and settled, working as a server, bartender, front desk clerk, gallery assistant, actor, and arts writer. About her art, Emily Mergel writes for Artscope Magazine “Shabott continually draws inspiration from abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann and breaks forms into their most evocative essentials…She seizes the opportunity to burst the gallery walls, speaking with intentional gesture in visual vocabulary all her own.” Shabott has had solo, group, juried and invitational shows at regional museums, galleries and cultural centers. She is represented by Berta Walker Gallery.