Cola Weeks, Laila

Laila Cola Weeks was born in 1986 in Berkeley, California to an American father and a German mother.  Both parents being artistically inclined, she began drawing at a young age and painted her first oil painting at 11.  In high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, her art teacher and ever-after close friend, Justin Bagley, taught her how to build canvases and encouraged her creative process.  She spent those years painting in acrylic, and won a couple of blue ribbons in an annual city-wide juried youth art exhibition.  At the University of New Mexico, Weeks was reintroduced to oil paint, and promptly fell in love with the medium.  She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from UNM in 2008.  In the past decade, Weeks has lived briefly in Queens, New York, as well as for a couple of years in Berlin, Germany, painting and drawing all along the way.  In early 2016, she began showing work regularly at Exhibit 208 in Albuquerque, where she currently resides.  “There is a beauty here in New Mexico, which is both legendary and subtle.  It is a beauty which does not present itself immediately, but which instead takes time to be appreciated.  Perhaps it is an acquired taste, one which I have learned to love.”  Her current series of oil paintings focuses on humanity in the digital age.

Episodes:
Albuquerque painter Laila Cola Weeks, artist Salma Arastu, artist Stuart Ratcliff, science and myth
Peter Sellers, Laila Cola Weeks, “Only in Albuquerque”