Laura Craig McNellis, a Nashville native, was born the youngest of four sisters. Mainly homeschooled, she began drawing and painting at a young age. With unwavering familial support, she was able to dedicate considerable time to art, her burgeoning practice absorbing her late into most nights. As an artist with autism and developmental disabilities, McNellis uses painting to convey how she experiences moments and memories, chronicling daily life, transportation and fashion.
McNellis often paints on newsprint, a preference that originated when her dad would bring home blank stacks from his job at the post office. Her paintings have a visual structure to them: rounded clouds hanging from the top, a sun placed in the righthand corner, and highly cropped corners and borders. Scenes play out close to the edges, creating an immediacy between the subject and viewer. When an artwork is finished, she folds it into quarters for storing, sometimes still wet with paint, an act made easy by the lightweight material of the newsprint. Although her verbal communication is limited, written text remains an important factor in much of her art. The text adds a compositional element, creating a border or background, sometimes obscured by cuts in the paper.
Much of McNellis’s work remained stored in her family home, where she lived with her parents, until their passings in the 1980s. After a 15-year lull in art-making, she moved to the artist residency programStudio XI / Signature Home in North Carolina (since closed), where she resumed her creative practice. Her work has been shown consistently, in group and solo exhibitions both at home and abroad, since the ’90s.
—Emily Q. Slavin, Intuit Art Museum curatorial fellow
