Valerie McLaughlin is a process-based acrylic painter exploring surrealism and trompe l'oeil technique.

 

Raised in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, her work often references her childhood spent outdoors and escaping to storybooks. Through imaginative play the natural world was romanticized to the farthest extent. Her work typically combines landscape with hints of the fantastical, attending to the behavior of light. 

Her creative process is highly dedicated, as she prefers to experiment through trial and error rather than using strict reference photos when creating realistic effects.

 

After her undergraduate career, where she studied psychology and art, Valerie has continued to navigate these two fields as they relate to one another. She paints a representation of cognitive or emotional conditions as they exist in one’s environment, evoking feelings of nostalgia, peace, anxiety, and escapism. All in all, her work is a display of the idealized imagination daring to exist in the external world- and her work is easily identified by a trompe l'oeil gold frame illusion painted directly onto the canvas.