This blog is my portfolio of artwork, a journal about my process of making art...and the things that I have no words for...

*Copyright notice* All photos, writing, and artwork are mine (
© Laura J. Wellner), unless otherwise noted, please be a peach, if you'd like to use my work for a project or you just love it and must have it, message me and we'll work out the details...it's simple...JUST ASK, please.



Saturday, November 29, 2014

Pieces of me...the duality of the artist and writer...following my bliss...



Is it a bird? 11/28/2004


I didn’t have a bird in mind when I made this one…This is an old pencil drawing in one of my sketchbooks…my drawings are more meditation than a study for something specific…I started doing them in a sketchbook that a friend gave to me for a present to fill with my doodles that I had been making on scraps of paper and post-it notes…these drawings were more mine than anything I ever made before. It was a special time for me creatively, I was following my bliss in both art and writing.

Book cover for The Fractured Hues of White Light, copyright 2010

At the same time that I was filling sketchbooks with these elaborate doodles, I was also working on the early draft of my novel, The Fractured Hues of White Light, so the sketchbook of my meandering pencil marks played a role in creating the main character Samantha Ryder…an autistic artist who makes copies of the greatest hits of the art world in miniature, which she didn’t like doing very much, she did this to please her father and the people who wanted her to make them—it is the doodles in her sketchbooks that are “hers”…it’s about that and more…


From the back cover:

To this day I still laugh at my misinterpretation when the doctor diagnosed me as autisticI thought he said "artistic"—so I laughed and cried out, "I draw just like my Daddy!" But no one laughed with me; my mother cried, my father became indignant, and the doctor defensive...Then my pencil went about the business of drawing—after all, I am artistic. But little picture's have ears—and my eyes didn't miss a thing, especially the emotions that sparkled in my mother's tear-filled eyes. My fixation with the emotional landscape of faces was always the quirky discrepancy of my being autistic—my drawings documented with intricate detail the people I loved best of all. The doctor thought this very unusual—puzzling, yet unique, he called me "special." 

My artist/writer pieces of me overlap and separate…it’s a duality that I manage (I don’t struggle with it—I’d get nowhere like that.) To compartmentalize these two endeavors, I gave the writing projects a name, Laura J. W. Ryan. It’s me, they’re mine.


I love what I do…

Currently, I'm editing my third novel, Drinking from the Fishbowl, which has been my focus for four years now, but it's been in the works since the initial notes that I started filling a salt n' pepper notebook around 2000-2001 or so...writing is such a slow process and just as meandering as my drawings...

I'm also preparing my latest contribution to the Sketchbook Project...I'm pretty excited about it—and of course, the drawings continue...