Classically trained and based in Hamilton, Ontario, Laura Heaney is a multifaceted artist equipped with a diverse skill set and a deep love for hyper-realism.

She can usually be found sitting in the same position for hours while perfecting the most minute detail in a painfully crafted drawing or clad in paint-covered overalls as she enlivens a canvas with swaths of acrylic. Her themes, mediums and subject matter vary, but her works share a distinct combination of traditional techniques and subjects, often found in the Renaissance and Romantic eras, combined with more contemporary motifs and accessible materials.

Her precedent series, Observing Green, is a pen and ink drawing series cataloguing green spaces in the face of growing environmental concerns. Using a richly stylized technique inspired by revered artists and their processes— like Franklin Booth, with his influential style curated by studying wood engravings at the turn of the 20th century— Heaney’s depictions lend a whimsical detachment to the landscapes of Canada, while the use of successive, inorganically straight lines in the sky provides a backdrop of obvious human interaction. Drawn in black and white, these precious green spaces are immortalized in a bygone style as though already lost.

Bolstering a visual arts education with studies in both history and art history, it is easy to see how her love of the old-meets-new developed in her artistic practice. Her work has been represented in galleries and shows throughout Southern Ontario, the Canadian Maritimes, Quebec and New York.