Laura Johanna Braverman (b. 1971) is an artist and writer. Austrian-American by birth and upbringing, Lebanese through marriage, she has called Lebanon home for nearly two decades. Her work explores the expressive possibilities of non-figurative imagery to convey unseen patterns, which encompass abstractions, such as transformation and healing, or modes of conceptualization, such as alchemy, metaphysical philosophy, and sacred geometry. The notion of a primordial ground also figures prominently in the work – a field within which things come to be, and to which things inevitably return. Through the medium of watercolor, she endeavors to convey these unseen elements through a visual music of color and form. The compositional investigations of harmony, resonance and dissonance in the interplay of shape and hue offer a possible avenue towards representing both a primordial still source, as well as the energetic constructions this source engenders. Though it may not be obviously apparent, the artist considers her work to be deeply informed by Lebanon, where energies of tension and chaos act as primal undercurrents to daily life. The country and surrounding regions have endured, and are enduring, unspeakable tragedies. These realities can be difficult to process and articulate literally – an abstract metaphysical language can function as a possible mode of approach. 

She received a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master’s Degree in Poetry from Lancaster University, and is currently a PhD candidate in Poetry. Her painting works were exhibited in Beirut in 2015, Source, and at the Mina Image Centre in 2023, An Ever-Changing Stream. Author of Salt Water (Cosmographia Books, 2019), she has published poems in Reliquiae, Plume, Levure Litteraire, New Plains Review, and California Quarterly, among other journals, and in the anthology Awake in the World, vol. II.

Bhrū-Madhya (Anchor Point) is a visual conceptualization of the third-eye, considered an energy point of inward-turning, meditative attention. This center can also be related to the sixth chakra, associated with clarity, intuitive focus and illumination. The kaleidoscopic colors are used to convey a sense of radiance, as white light contains all the colors in the spectrum, while the composition illustrates an opening onto a central sphere, holding both poles of black and white: fertile void and transcendence.