Artist Biography
Heather Lara was born and raised in New England where she developed an appreciation for nature at an early age. She's lived many places since her childhood but now happily resides in Temecula, California with her family and too many critters to mention them all.
A volunteer job with the Animal Department at the Living Desert in Palm Desert introduced her to a career as a serious artist when she was hired by the Graphics Department full time. She expanded her resume by working freelance for the American Wilderness Experience, helping them open their zoo from the ground up by creating many of the exhibit graphics. When she moved to Argentina it was a sharp detour from her rising career path but she spent her time down there collecting dogs and honing her craft - she even had her first solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Fisherton.
Though she doesn't have an art degree, the Scientific Illustration classes she attended at the University of California at Santa Cruz helped her develop the techniques she uses now and her Biology Degree has given her the necessary knowledge of form and structure to create the extremely lifelike depictions of her subjects.
Heather's painstaking attention to detail has created a portfolio rich in the diversity of life, from landscapes and portraits in pastel and watercolor to meticulous wildlife scenes in colored pencil. But what she's sharing with you here is her love of scratchboard, a unique and challenging medium that really lets her showcase her attention to exquisite detail. She believes that all of nature has beauty, even the smallest insect, and hopes to share this with others through her art. In addition to Argentina, her work has been shown worldwide in galleries in Canada, Russia, and Australia, and nationally in New York, Texas, Washington DC, Georgia, Arizona, and California.
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