Laura Clay

Ophelia is fascinating not because of what Hamlet or her father did to her but because she is one of literature’s most vivid examples of someone whose identity completely unravels when the structures holding it together collapse. She was a daughter, a lover, an obedient woman, and when those roles fell apart she had nothing left underneath them that was entirely her own. A story about identity and how much of it we build from the outside in rather than the inside out.

This painting is what that unraveling looks like from the inside. Color moving through darkness, forms that almost resolve and then don’t. Forms moving through dark water, partially submerged, and partially visible. Beautiful and unsettled at the same time.

Ophelia, now available for presale via the link in my bio.

Mole de Ajo. Garlic, and the smell of it in my grandmother’s kitchen as soon as you walk through the door. Part of the new collection, up for presale now. Comment PRESALE for the link.

Laura Clay Robson || “My work is abstract yet deeply personal, blending organic textures with geometric structure to create compositions that explore identity, movement, and transformation.”

Laura Clay is a Mexican-American artist based in Austin, specializing in painting and drawing. Her abstract paintings feature gradients, textures, and a balance between organic and geometric forms, reflecting her exploration of bicultural identity and the tension between chaos and order. She creates her own handmade paints and uses high-quality materials, including architectural pens and archival paper, to craft detailed fine-line drawings. She holds an MFA from the National Art School in Sydney, Australia, a BFA from Texas Christian University, and has studied fine art at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She also completed a year at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C., now part of George Washington University. Her work has been acquired by Mexic-Arte Museum for its permanent collection and has been featured in publications such as Eastside Magazine. With over 60 exhibitions and art fairs worldwide, she is currently represented by Washington Gallery Waco and The Cathedral ATX. Through abstraction, Laura’s work navigates themes of displacement, balance, and identity, offering an immersive exploration of form and cultural narrative.

Read the full interview at artistcloseup.com

My mother, Estela Villaseñor de Hernández, spent over thirty years restoring the historic mining architecture of Guanajuato. She trained as an architect there, then went back for a master’s focused on the hidden structures beneath the city, the walls other people had stopped looking at.

She started painting alongside that work, not apart from it. Watercolor, she says, asks for the same eye as restoration: strict control and total spontaneity, both at once. She paints a local miner, a street vendor, the alleyway outside her studio, always looking past the surface for what a place has held onto.

I grew up watching her move between those two practices like they were one. It shaped how I think about materials, about what a surface can carry besides paint.

Next month, my mother and I will show together for the first time, at the Affordable Art Fair Boston. Her paintings and mine, side by side.

Hispanic Heritage Month starts today. I can’t think of a better way to mark it than standing next to her.

Affordable Art Fair Houston and Boston are coming, but this work was made for everyone, regardless of where they live. Comment PRESALE for the link and see the collection before it leaves my studio.

Gorditas de nata are sold warm by street vendors in Mexico City, small thick discs cooked on a comal until golden, soft and pillowy inside with that faint sweetness that comes from the nata, the thick cream that rises to the top of raw milk. You buy them in a paper bag and eat them before they cool down because they are never as good any other way.

This painting is that softness. The rounded forms folding into each other on raw jute, warm and pillowy, the texture of the fabric showing through the paint the way the comal marks show on the outside of the gordita. Dense and simple and completely satisfying.

Part of the new collection, De Nata is up for presale now. Comment PRESALE for the link.

Cebollitas encurtidas start white and with enough time in vinegar and lime they turn a deep pink. The onion is still sharp but has transformed by everything it absorbed along the way.

Painting is a lot like cooking. Every canvas starts blank, and with time and the right ingredients the colors deepen and the composition finds its place. Both processes shouldn’t be rushed, and the result is always richer for taking its time.

The Compartment series is about identity, how it forms, how it shifts, how it becomes something more interesting with time.

Cebollitas Encurtidas, now available for acquisition.
Comment PRESALE for the link.

My aunt makes the best pozole and I have never found another that comes close. Maybe it has more to do with the memories spent around her dining room table than the recipe itself.

I can still see the large metal pot at the center of it all, ladlefuls of green broth, and then the joyful chaos of toppings being passed around: cabbage, radish, onion, cilantro, lime, oregano, tostadas. We all build our own bowls and we each end up with something slightly different. This painting is about every version of that meal and every conversation that happened around it.