Guest Post : Laurie Anne Art

Hi friends, Laurie Anne here! Last week Sarah, Emmett, my husband, Taylor, myself and our pups spent a few days on the Oregon Coast and it was a WONDERFUL break from the Phoenix and Salt Lake City summer heat! We got to talking and decided it would be fun for me to write a guest blog post! Click through to read it and learn more about our friendship and my art…

If you don’t know the story, Sarah and I became friends via Instagram because we both have wire fox terriers, more on that here. We eventually became real life friends when we went on a weekend trip to NYC together a few years ago for the Domino Blog Awards (I was Sarah’s plus one because Emmett couldn’t go). It was a hilarious way to meet in real life because I was waiting at her terminal gate with her name written in giant letters on my iPad, haha!

Sarah and Emmett have become some of our dearest friends who we seem to visit every few months…twice in the last 1.5 months actually, and it’s a huge bonus that the drive from Phoenix to Salt Lake City is sooo beautiful! It’s one of my favorite drives that has inspired many of my paintings. I’ll link some of my recent favorites from our travels!

Click directly on the paintings below to be redirected to the source- or use the numbered links below the collage to shop my art…

01: palm island // 02: antibes coast // 03: lost beach // 04: foggy countryside // 05: olive hills // 06: big cottonwood // 07: french coast // 08: painted river // 09: countryside creek // 10: spanish morning // 11: antelope island // 12: zion // 13: the lake // 14: morning desert

I painted Antelope Island after a trip to visit Sarah and Emmett in July. She took us to Antelope Island to drive around and search for Bison. It was such a beautiful area and I took about 400 photos… this was one of the paintings that came from that visit. I definitely recommend visiting there if you are ever in SLC!

Sarah came to Phoenix last summer to make over our bedroom and bathroom that desperately needed help. She nailed it and we still love it so much! Every time I walk into our room, I am instantly calm with how beautiful and peaceful it is. I’m still trying to convince her to come back to makeover the rest of our house because the bedroom is much more beautiful than our other rooms! I think I’ll get her to do it eventually (maybe when she and Emmett are tired of snow this winter), haha!

Last year, we both took vacations to Europe and ended up in different parts of France a week apart. I painted these paintings from a drive along the French Mediterranean coast just north of the Spanish border. The small port towns and wine vineyards along the Mediterranean were so dreamy! Sarah and Emmett spent some time in Antibes and I couldn’t help but paint from one of the photos she took! You can find that print linked here.

The inspiration for Painted River (shown above as a 24×36 inch print) came from our first drive to SLC from Phoenix to visit the Gibsons a couple years ago. On the drive, we saw a beautiful patch of yellow trees out in the desert and followed a random dirt road down to an amazing river that inspired at least two or three of my paintings.

Last month, when driving up to SLC to escape the Phoenix heat, we were able to visit Zion and I captured the stunning red rocks and canyons in the above painting. I can’t wait to get home to paint from all of our Oregon photos!! Basically, being friends and taking adventures with Sarah & Emmett has inspired a lot of my artwork. I’m sure we’ll plan our next one soon! Hope you enjoyed reading about the inspiration behind a few of my paintings. This was really fun! I also wanted to say thanks for your support on Instagram (I hit a big milestone last night- 30k!). Follow along for more of my artwork and travel inspiration if you’re interested. I’d love for you to join the fun!