West Australian oil painter, Mia Laing has successfully navigated being a multiple genre artist, painting widely across still life, narrative portraiture, wildlife, pets, whimsy and illustration, receiving awards, gallery representation and greeting card and homeware licensing for a number of her paintings over the last 15 years.

Born in Kenya, East Africa, before returning to her Mother’s home town of Perth in the early 1970’s. Mia spent an idyllic childhood in Cottesloe, a beautiful coastal suburb of Perth, bordered by the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean and the meandering Swan River. Shared time between her parents gave her the best of both worlds; the tranquility of the Aussie bush and beach and the fast paced excitement of school holidays spent with her commercial aviator father, exploring many parts of Asia.

The early days of her career were spent pursuing children’s illustration in watercolour and gouache. Mia’s current work still includes many aspects of the detailed and narrative drawings she once produced, combining still-life, wildlife and landscape into refined larger scale oil paintings. Her paintings have affiliations with illustration, narrative art, conceptualism, symbolism, surrealism and traditional realism.

Mia’s most recent paintings fall into the newer genre of imaginative realism; a genre that is finding strength in today’s competitive and collectable art market. She starts with a concept, for example, suitcases, and forms and imagines a scene from there, creating a painting purely from her imagination, seeking reference photos for the various elements within the painting mostly from her own photography.

Creativity and humour and a play on language are a constant source of inspiration for Mia. Many of the forms in her newer works are symbolic, though most are purely decorative and she will often title her works with an idiom or cliche. Depending on the viewer's lived experience, each viewer will read a different story in her art. Mia’s artworks are created to bring joy and colour into homes.

Mia Laing - Sunshine and Rainbows