Valerie McLaughlin is an acrylic painter exploring surrealism and dreamscaping. Raised in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, her work often references her childhood spent outdoors and escaping to storybooks. Through imaginative play the natural world was romanticized to the farthest extent. Her work typically combines landscape with hints of the fantastical, attending to the behavior of light. 

Valerie has dabbled in most physical media- such as crochet, sculpture, drawing, and sewing- but has narrowed in on acrylic painting over the past 5 years. After completing her AP Studio art portfolio in 2020 where she expressed the intersection of surrealistic landscapes and mental health issues, she began studying psychology and art at Saint Joseph’s University. Throughout her undergraduate career, and concluded in her senior project thesis, Valerie has continued to navigate these two fields as they relate to one another. She paints a representation of cognitive or emotional conditions as they exist in one’s environment, evoking feelings of nostalgia, peace, anxiety, and escapism. All in all, her work is a display of the idealized imagination daring to exist in the external world.