Laura Quinn Harris

Laura Quinn Harris is a UK artist specialising in oil portraits of people and animals. Her work has been displayed in numerous exhibitions across the UK and abroad, including the prestigious BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition. She was the winner of the RBSA Prize 2022 and her work has been shortlisted for the Wildlife Artist of the Year and A&I Artists of the Year Awards. She was an invited artist on BBC1’s Extraordinary Portraits in 2022 and was a runner-up on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2014. Her sitters have included Sir Ian McKellen, Richard Dawkins and Armando Iannucci, and she was commissioned by the Royal College of Music to paint Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, whose portrait now hangs in the Britten Theatre.

Laura gained a degree in Mathematics from University College London, followed by a degree in Scientific & Natural History Illustration from Blackpool and the Fylde School of Art and Design. Here she discovered a passion for producing highly detailed images of the natural world. She enjoys focusing her attention on all the little elements that make a face unique, and builds up many translucent layers of oil paint to achieve the detail in her paintings. She undertakes commissions from all over the world and each one can take up to several months to complete.