Artist Laura Pawlik’s Painting Gets Times Square Spotlight on New Year’s Eve

When New York City bids farewell to 2022 and ushers in 2023 with its famous ball drop in Times Square, there will be a little bit of Colorado on one of the colossal digital billboards lighting up the street: a dream-inspired painting by Denver artist Laura Pawlik.

This fall, the Kessler Collection (based in Savannah, Georgia, with a satellite gallery at Beaver Creek Lodge in Vail) issued an open call to emerging artists across the country, looking for what it called “The Next Original.” More than 1,800 artists submitted their work – over 5,000 pieces in all.

Pawlik found the announcement on social media on November 7 and submitted her work. She was one of nine hand-picked finalists to travel to Savannah to display their work. But instead of picking one artist from the finalists, organizers decided that all nine would be named “The Next Original” and have their art not only featured in Grand Bohemian galleries across the country throughout 2023, but also in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2022.

“It’s such an honor,” Pawlik says. “And so amazing to be in these high-end hotels and galleries across the country.”

Pawlik considers herself a late bloomer in the art world; she was forty when she first put brush to canvas in a serious way. She’d taken art classes throughout her youth in Montana, but they were nothing serious. She married, moved to Denver, worked as an aesthetician and later for TSA, and joined a Jungian group that inspired her to paint what she saw in her dreams. “That was really it,” Pawlik says. “Things would show up in the process of painting that gave me better clues as to what my dreams were about. It really had nothing to do with art.”

That was back in 2010, and Pawlik was also going through a divorce and all the associated life changes. “I was thinking, should I buy a condo or an art studio?” Pawlik recalls. “So I bought an art studio.” That studio is Atelier on Santa Fe, the first place Pawlik was able to display her dream-inspired oil paintings.

Pawlik admits that she was somewhat surprised to find that there was a market for her work. “They were really meant for my eyes only,” she says. “Dreams aren’t necessarily attractive or pretty sometimes. I didn’t consider at least some of the paintings appealing. But the pieces sometimes would inspire people who came into the gallery to talk about their dreams. Some people wanted to buy paintings that I didn’t think were sellable; they were of a dream of mine. I’d think, ‘Nobody would want that.’ But they did.

“It’s all by chance,” Pawlik laughs. “I’m 55, and what I love about the experience is that it’s a reminder that it’s not over ’til it’s over. You can start painting late. You don’t need a fancy background in art. But it works out. Carl Jung talked about the second half of life. The first half of life, you’re trying to achieve outer things,” she notes, citing survival, comfort, money, recognition.

“But the second half, you’re trying to achieve the inner things. Those inner things are what’s most important,” she concludes. “Art is that way. Art is all about the inner.”

See more about Laura Pawlik and her gallery at 910 Santa Fe Drive on its