shades of eden

In her magical LA garden, artist Mimi Lauter contemplates the cycle of life and the rapturous power of color

- MAYER RUS

When it comes to gardens cultivated by painters, there's a natural inclination to regard the landscape as a correlative to the artist's studio practice. For the Los Angeles-based painter Mimi Lauter, the connections between her artwork and her garden-an ecstatic botanical wonderland unexpectedly tucked behind a modest home in LA's scrappy Echo Park-are not difficult to discern. First, of course, is Lauter's devotion not only to vivid color but to a kind of chromatic alchemy that relies on strategic juxtapositions and strange affinities to invest her compositions with power and poignancy. In both her garden and her paintings, color is the cicerone that guides Lauter's audience through emotional journeys fraught with personal iconography and symbolic meditations on life and mortality. It's no surprise that the artist's studio is planted squarely within the confines of her polychrome paradise.

"A lot of my work relates to my perception of color in the garden.

Cultivating the land is a lot like making a painting. You begin by preparing the soil the way you prepare the surface of the picture.