Laura Fair-Schulz was born on Georgian Bay in Penetanguishene, Canada and currently lives in upstate New York with her partner, German historian Axel Fair-Schulz.
A practicing artist, informed by Marxist theory, she has taught art and art history in several colleges and universities part-time and currently teaches in the State University of New York system as adjunct faculty.
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By a stroke of generosity, Laura Fair started oil painting with local Lakefield, Ontario painter and educator, Jesse Ruth Tyler, around age 10. She was fortunate to study in her teens with incredibly accomplished watercolourists in high school: Mr. Vero (LDSS) and Mr. McKnight (TASS). Later, she won a province-wide scholarship to study at the Art Gallery of Ontario in a Summer Scholarship program. She has studied art at OCAD University, George Brown College, and The Art Centre of Central Technical School in Toronto and completed a BFA and MFA at BYU in the United States.
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The work on this website is based in Fair-Schulz's original photography (using herself as a sitter), adjusted digitally, and sometimes including photographs of her original drawings and paintings.
Her non-digital drawing and painting is figurative, highly materialist, "painterly," and abstract, requiring close observation into the textures and visual arrangements. It is biographical and full of metaphors.
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Daughter to a WWII generation, who brought something of the war home, she developed ptsd at a young age, only to discover that neither medicine nor society grasped much about the wilderness that exists for people who have it.
Fair-Schulz expresses solidarity (as a female, a bisexual, and a disabled person) with any and all who promote the horizontal inclusion of diversity.
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Regarding the evolution of art in the capitalist ethos:
The expected commodification of an artist's work and life is profoundly alienating to anyone who doesn't fit.
There have to be spaces for all art; as there has to be a place at the table for all peoples.