One Life, Laura Cullen, 2023, oil & acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.

Embodied Color and Inner Form in Laura Cullen’s Women

February 19, 2026 Gavin Coates

Featured image: One Life, Laura Cullen, 2023, oil & acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.

Laura Cullen’s 2024 series Woman No.1, Woman No.2, and Woman No.3 presents the female form as a site of psychological, emotional, and chromatic intensity.

Laura Cullen is a painter whose work explores the female form through abstraction, using saturated color and expressive line to convey interior states and embodied emotion.

Working in oil and oil pastel on canvas at a consistent scale, Cullen abstracts the figure without dissolving it entirely, allowing bodily presence to remain central while identity becomes fluid. These works resist portraiture in a conventional sense, instead proposing the figure as a vessel for sensation, memory, and interior states expressed through color, line, and rhythm.

Woman No.1, Laura Cullen, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.

In Woman No.1, Cullen establishes the foundational language of the series: a vertical, elongated figure fractured by dark linear contours and surrounded by deep, saturated fields of blue and violet. The body appears cracked yet luminous, filled with warm yellows, oranges, and reds that suggest inner vitality rather than surface realism. The contrast between the glowing interior and the cool surrounding space creates tension between containment and expansion. The figure reads less as an individual body and more as a charged presence, shaped by internal forces pressing outward.

Woman No.2, Laura Cullen, 2024, oil pastel on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.

Woman No.2, rendered in oil pastel, introduces a heightened sense of movement and softness. The figure dissolves further into its environment, composed of densely packed, multicolored marks that blur the boundary between body and surrounding forms. Swirling shapes and floral-like motifs orbit the figure, suggesting growth, emotion, or psychic activity. Cullen’s use of pastel amplifies texture and immediacy, giving the surface a tactile, almost vibrating quality. The work emphasizes transformation and permeability, positioning the figure as inseparable from its energetic field.

Woman No.3, Laura Cullen, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in. / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.

In Woman No.3, Cullen shifts toward a brighter, more expansive palette dominated by yellows, greens, and reds. The figure stands more clearly defined, yet remains partially obscured by gestural lines and surrounding organic shapes. Floral and wave-like forms intertwine with the body, evoking cycles of emergence and dissolution. The composition feels less constrained than the earlier works, suggesting openness or resolution. Rather than stability, however, this clarity reads as acceptance of flux, the figure remains dynamic, continually shaped by its environment.

Together, Woman No.1, Woman No.2, and Woman No.3 form a cohesive exploration of embodiment as a mutable, interior-driven condition. Cullen treats the female form not as a static subject but as an evolving structure through which emotion, sensation, and memory flow. Color becomes psychological, line becomes connective tissue, and abstraction serves to deepen rather than obscure meaning. The central theme uniting the series is inner visibility: the body as a living map of internal experience rather than external appearance.

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