about
Laria Saunders’ is a former dancer/photographer whose primary body of work is digital photo assemblage paintings. Her portfolio also includes traditional and experimental photography, video art, animated paintings, plus NFT’s - both still and animated.
She is represented by Octavia Art Gallery - New Orleans and exhibited at this gallery in 2022 in a group show called "Digital Reality." ArtLifting-Boston currently represents seventy of Laria's works and collectors include, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Warner Media, Sony Pictures Entertainment.
In 2012, Laria switched to painting on her phone due to daily severe migraine and many other painful conditions. The small emitting light screen enabled her to create 350 paintings to date. She has recently switched to working on the tablet.
Saunders’ was born in Boston and raised equally there and in New York and Los Angeles. She has lived in many places including, India, Czech Republic, Italy and Mexico. Her artistic family spans four generations on both sides and includes professional artists in painting, music, theater, dance and photography. This self-taught artist is often seen in the streets snapping images of aging walls, organic sidewalks, dirty puddles and cracks in the road. She does these walk-bouts to collect her palette library and each piece contains 20-100 bits and pieces of texture images that can take several hours to several months to create (see statement for more on process).
Laria has a Bachelor of Arts from University California Los Angeles (UCLA) in World Arts & Culture/Dance. She was trained as a modern dancer and specialized in the Odissi style of Classical Indian dance (Orissa, India). She was performing across the United States before the chronic illness started in 1998.
Saunders is also self-taught photographer and has been recognized by Light & Composition Magazine as the “top 100 photographers of 2014" and been exhibited at Linus Gallery, 1650 Gallery, Groovworx Gallery, Whole 9 Gallery in Los Angeles, plus Gallery Violet in London.
For the last twenty-four years, Laria has been battling ten painful chronic conditions/disease, including daily severe migraine, a spinal injury called, Transverse Myelitis (demyelination), Fibromyalgia, Occipital Neuralgia, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, etc. Mostly unaided by medications due to multiple severe allergies, she has had to turn to alternatives such as ablation (burning of nerves) and a permanent stimulator implant.
After decades of seeking help all over the world and being hospitalized a total of eight months, it is only recently that she has found pain management. Saunders’ attributes her early obsession with meditation enabling her to survive the Kafkaesque medical maze. “Hurting from head to toe and losing everything, allowed me to completely and utterly STOP and this turned out to be a great catalyst both spiritually and artistically. “
A decade ago, Laria switched to digital painting, she found solace in the abstract world. “The abstract space is poetically similar to dance; the accents, fields and valleys are open to interpretation and have an alternate rhythm, cadence and consciousness to the figurative space.”
Currently, Saunders’ solely creates digital photo assemblage paintings and animations and since 2021 has entered the NFT world on curated platform, KnownOrigin. She often collaborates with her father, Theo Saunders, an internationally known jazz pianist/composer and many of the animated soundtracks are his original compositions.
Laria lives with her husband and golden retriever in Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Laria exclaims, “I am done with living in the dark, hello world!”
*A CV provided upon request*
*If you want read about Laria's family of artists, actors and performers click here . It's a page in progress.