Lori Demand

Hometown: Dickinson, Texas

Age: 63

Artistry: Painter and gallery owner

Online: itsalori.com, @itsalori2 on Instagram

She calls it “The Garden,” but where artist Lori Demand has just planted her creative life does not branch off into shadowed, overgrown woods. The central room inside In Demand Art Studios leads to the slightly more tamed workspaces of her artist friends. The only flowers are her vivid abstract expressionist pieces coloring the walls in feral strokes. Each creative’s room has an evocative name, and for hers, Demand chose “Wildflower.”

“I’ve always been a tiny bit of a renegade,” Demand says. “If someone tells me I can’t do something, I’m the type to take that and use it for my good. ‘I’ll show you’ has always been my approach.”

That rebellious streak has led the daughter of a NASA engineer, and herself a Texas A&M graduate in petroleum engineering, to fully embrace her identity as an artist for the first time in her 60s.

She had long used her family’s home as a canvas for creative projects, practicing faux finishing and leaning into interior design and antique upcycling, but it was a nudge from a church friend, the feedback she received on the paintings she gave away to her children and friends, and an invitation to take part in a charity project helmed by stained glass icon Steve Wilson, that inspired Demand to take her art seriously a few years ago.

Always methodical, Demand researched LLCs, sought out mentorship from experienced painters, and taught herself the basics of web design and social media. Starting in late 2021, she went from making a handful of paintings a year for fun to being stocked with dozens at local arts markets.

“It’s in my DNA now,” Demand says. “I never grasped how important this could be to my personal joy. There’s nothing better than connecting and creating—releasing tension, or anger, or walking out and seeing a beautiful day and wanting to take that in completely and put it into art.”

Every painting session begins with meditation and then lots of music—elements that help Demand balance the rigidity of her engineering brain. Before each piece is finished, she takes a photo, desaturates the color and inspects it in black and white. As a contrarian, having contrast is important to her. Some of her pieces even feature broken bottles or littered papers found on walks around the LSU Lakes and made beautiful. As for flowers, wild or otherwise, they become her unexpected muse.

“I didn’t set out to paint a ton of florals,” Demand says. “That surprised me. They found me.”