- Growing up in downtown Laurel, Jones spent summers at art camp and weekends walking to the museum. Today, she is building a career with a simple but profound idea: places matter.
Before Laura Jones became known for painting wedding chapels, English gardens, and scenes of faraway places, she was an eighth grader in an art classroom in Laurel, Mississippi, discovering that creativity could be more than a hobby.
Her art teacher, Cassie Clark, filled lessons with art history and invited working artists to speak with her students. One afternoon in 2012, Jones met artists she admired, including Laurel native Erin Napier and Christo, the internationally acclaimed environmental artist recognized for transforming public spaces into immersive works of art.
That was the first time art felt tangible.
“I remember my Intro to Design professor telling me I could have a lucrative career as a painter, but I brushed the comment off because that was not as legit as graphic design,” she recalls.
Like many young artists, Jones pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic design at Mississippi State University, but painting remained a regular presence. “I chose graphic design concentration because I wanted a practical degree, a real job,” Jones recalls. “Funny enough, all of my professors were either illustrators or painters.”
Yet as graduation neared in spring 2020, Jones felt certain that graphic design wasn’t her path.
“I had a pit in my stomach my entire senior year, realizing I could not sit behind a computer designing graphics for the rest of my life.”
Jones graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic when advertising agencies had stopped hiring, and the future was increasingly unclear. But what appeared to be a setback became an opening. She began creating custom watercolor commissions for a local company whose online store saw demand surge during lockdowns. In a single year, she painted more than 300 watercolors.
Those settings have become her signature.
Soon after, she began teaching watercolor classes through the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the institution she credits with molding her artistic identity.
“I didn’t recognize it, but I was taking the first steps on my creative path. I still feel very much so at the beginning,” she says.
Growing up in downtown Laurel, Jones spent summers at art camp and weekends walking to the museum. Surrounded by art from an early age, and encouraged by parents who enthusiastically supported her creative ambitions, she developed an understanding of art not as an abstract dream, but as a meaningful way of life.
Today, the Laurel-based artist is building a career with a simple but profound idea: places matter. A family church, a garden in bloom, or scenes from a favorite film, Jones’s work urges viewers to rethink the backgrounds of their own lives.
“We are all obsessed with the idea of home, places of dwelling,” she says. “I look for little dwelling vignettes everywhere. A church nestled into the hills. A mossy statue amongst an exploding garden.”
Over the years, Jones has painted watercolor churches for wedding invitations and save-the-dates. What began as a handful of commissions has evolved into custom watercolor crests, hand-painted invitation suites, programs, and stationery.
Her paintings often become heirlooms.
When couples share their love stories, or families ask her to preserve a treasured home or meaningful landmark, Jones sees her work as something larger than herself.
“This is my favorite part of what I do, and it’s my ‘why,'” she says. “I get to sit down with a bride and hear her love story, and the vision she has for her wedding day, or someone calls me when their family member passes and asks me to paint a beloved place. It’s in those moments that I feel like my profession gives me a purpose beyond myself.”
For Jones, art is less about documenting architecture than preserving emotion.
Her fascination with places is perhaps most apparent in her recent collection inspired by the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.
Rather than focusing on the story’s beloved characters, Jones turned her attention to the landscapes, estates, and transitional spaces that inform the narrative.
“I wanted the viewer to recognize the scene, but maybe not be able to place why. Some of my paintings focus on transitional moments in the story,” she says.
She paused the film more than 100 times to capture images and moments: The Bennet family’s backyard, the rotunda where Mr. Darcy confesses his love, the countryside where Mr. Bingley gathers the courage to propose. Her favorite piece, titled Pacing for Courage, depicts a layered panorama of fields, water, and the Bennet home.
“We may not be paying attention, but in every story, the setting is a main character. What I love so much about this collection is the full circle it makes.”
The collection reflects how every place holds memories. By elevating the background, viewers see the surroundings differently.
In 2023, Jones experienced another turning point.
She traveled outside the United States for the first time, joining a painting retreat on the Greek island of Andros alongside her college roommate, fellow artist Ann Douglas.
The journey required planes, ferries, and winding taxi rides to reach Melisses, a remote retreat perched above the Aegean Sea. For five days, Jones painted alongside artists from around the world.
“We shared every meal with the other guests, exchanging our funniest stories and learning about each other’s lives in different areas of the world, and by the end of the week, we left with sketchbooks overflowing with paintings, and a group of lifelong friends,” she says.
Inspired by the Mediterranean landscape and encouraged by fellow artists, Jones experimented with acrylic washes rather than traditional watercolor, a shift that was both pragmatic and creative.
“Watercolor is very soft and takes a lot of time to build colors and layers,” she explains. “Acrylic offers bright punches of color and quicker dry time.” Where watercolor feels formal, acrylic feels playful. Jones contrasts the two, saying, “Watercolor for a wedding suite, and acrylic for a living room centerpiece.”
That evolution naturally led to her Garden Collection, a series inspired by time spent studying cultivated landscapes and patterns of nature. The collection, featured at the juried Loyola Art Show in Mobile, Alabama, brought Jones a feeling of serenity.
“Gardening and painting are more similar than they are different,” she says. “Both are experimental, therapeutic, and creative.”
Like gardens, her paintings welcome change. Light shifts. Seasons evolve. No two days—and no two compositions—are ever the same.
Even as her work gains recognition through exhibitions, commissions, and appearances on HGTV’s Home Town, Jones remains grounded in the uncertainty associated with a creative life.
“The business side of the practice is always overwhelming to me,” she admits.
She still balances painting with another career, allowing art to remain a source of exploration. There are periods of doubt. Collections that do not sell as quickly as hoped. Questions about what comes next.
But Jones has learned to trust the process.
“Success takes much longer than I ever anticipated,” she says.
She calls today her “beginning era,” a time defined by firsts, from international travel to major exhibitions and new artistic directions. As she travels through the Badlands and Mount Rushmore with her family, she is already contemplating the paintings that may emerge from the backgrounds. She doesn’t know what’s coming, but says, “I can feel the stones rolling, gaining speed.”
