Bio

Camille Laoang was born in Washington D. C. in 1971 to artist parents and was raised in suburban Maryland. As a girl, she explored the various art forms of dance, acting and music, but eventually realized that visual art best suited her. She began to seriously study art as a teenager and later attended Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, earning a BFA.

After college, Ms. Laoang moved to New York City and found work restoring vintage posters. In New York, she was struck by the dense multicultural population. Living in this diverse environment led her to explore themes of relationships and solitude in her art. Throughout the 1990s, she created a series of figurative works reflecting these themes. Also evident in these paintings are inspirations from European early 20th century painters such as Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. She began exhibiting her work in 1994.

In 1999, Ms. Laoang left New York to spend eighteen months in London on a "self appointed sabbatical". In this different environment, her style changed notably from fairly solid, spatially based compositions of interior scenes, to a style that released itself from those formal constraints and became less reality based and more reflective of psychological and spiritual matters. In London, she worked exclusively in watercolor and ink. Friends there introduced her to new interests such as the I-Ching and the symbolism found in alchemy. The "unseen forces that underlie our reality" subsequently became the prevailing theme in her work. While in London, she exhibited her work in the gallery at Metro Cinema.

Returning to New York, Ms. Laoang applied this new found style to oil painting while continuing to use watercolor. In this decade she came into a body of spiritual teachings which became a very important part of her life and this is reflected in her subject matter. In addition, a growing awareness and concern about the state of the world, with its mounting problems, has resulted in a shift away from the intimate psychological scenes towards something larger and more inclusive. In 2005, she exhibited a series of landscapes that embody these ideas and concerns. The most recent phase is a shift towards abstraction with the "Disintegration" and "Diamond" series, shown in this book. Camille Laoang works and exhibits in Brooklyn and New York.