Laura Molina was born in East Los Angeles, California in 1957 and grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley. Her father is a Tejano, a descendent of San Antonio's Hispanic settlers and Coahuiltecan Indians. Ranchers and Vaqueros who were made United States citizens under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
She began her career as a professional artist at the age of 16, producing large-scale production paintings and sculptures for a local company buildng Rose Parade floats. After graduating early from Arroyo High School in January of 1976, she participated in the theatrical training program at the Inner-City Cultural Center, Los Angeles, studying acting and performance technique with mentors C. Bernard Jackson and George C. Wolfe. In 1979 she was accepted into the Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts. She studied art and film making with 2 annual scholarships from the Walt Disney Studios.
During the early 1980s she supporting herself by painting billboards in the traditional technique, oil paint and occasionally worked as an animation Inbetweener. In the 1990's she spent 2 years as an Imagineer for The Walt Disney Company. In 1994 she studied in painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and life-drawing at the American Animation Institute in North Hollywood. In 2001 she expanding her range of media by studying multimedia production. She worked prolifically as a scenic artist and animatronics figure-finisher in motion pictures, television and theme parks until 2005. In 2006 she founded Chicano Art Magazine and returned to film making as her next creative vocation. In 2009, she began writing her first novel, The Red Moon.
Molina formed much of her aesthetic as a reaction to the images she saw perpetuated in the popular media. Subsequent projects have included the Naked Dave series of paintings, a self-published comic book, Cihualyaomiquiz,The Jaguar, a reaction to California's Proposition 187, featuring an avenging Mexican-American super heroine. She is listed in The Great Women Cartoonists by Trina Robbins published by Watson-Guptill in 2001. The artist says her life and painting style was changed when she attended the June 1999 opening of La Patria Portatil, 100 years of Mexican Chromo Art Calendars at the Latino Museum of Art History and Culture. Her biography and five of her paintings were included in Contemporary Chicano and Chicana Art published by Bilingual Review / Press in 2002. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Self Help Graphics from 1993 through 1995 and participated in the Screen Print Atelier in 2003 and 2006
She lives on the edge of the Mojave Desert, from which she draws inspiration, and maintains an intensely personal web site, Naked Dave.com, as the self-proclaimed "Angriest Woman in the World". The series, the artist and web site have been the subject of several academic and Pop culture articles in recent years including Professor Dora Ramirez-Dhoore's 2005 essay The Cyberborderland: Surfing the Web for Xicanidad in the academic journal, Chicana/Latina Studies, MALCS: Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and Naked Dave by Heidi MacDonald on her weblog, The Beat - The News Blog of Comics Culture, February 18, 2005. A documentary short film, Naked Dave was made about her artistic obsessions by film makers Alex Schaffert and David Callaghan in 2004.
She began her career as a professional artist at the age of 16, producing large-scale production paintings and sculptures for a local company buildng Rose Parade floats. After graduating early from Arroyo High School in January of 1976, she participated in the theatrical training program at the Inner-City Cultural Center, Los Angeles, studying acting and performance technique with mentors C. Bernard Jackson and George C. Wolfe. In 1979 she was accepted into the Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts. She studied art and film making with 2 annual scholarships from the Walt Disney Studios.
During the early 1980s she supporting herself by painting billboards in the traditional technique, oil paint and occasionally worked as an animation Inbetweener. In the 1990's she spent 2 years as an Imagineer for The Walt Disney Company. In 1994 she studied in painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and life-drawing at the American Animation Institute in North Hollywood. In 2001 she expanding her range of media by studying multimedia production. She worked prolifically as a scenic artist and animatronics figure-finisher in motion pictures, television and theme parks until 2005. In 2006 she founded Chicano Art Magazine and returned to film making as her next creative vocation. In 2009, she began writing her first novel, The Red Moon.
Molina formed much of her aesthetic as a reaction to the images she saw perpetuated in the popular media. Subsequent projects have included the Naked Dave series of paintings, a self-published comic book, Cihualyaomiquiz,The Jaguar, a reaction to California's Proposition 187, featuring an avenging Mexican-American super heroine. She is listed in The Great Women Cartoonists by Trina Robbins published by Watson-Guptill in 2001. The artist says her life and painting style was changed when she attended the June 1999 opening of La Patria Portatil, 100 years of Mexican Chromo Art Calendars at the Latino Museum of Art History and Culture. Her biography and five of her paintings were included in Contemporary Chicano and Chicana Art published by Bilingual Review / Press in 2002. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Self Help Graphics from 1993 through 1995 and participated in the Screen Print Atelier in 2003 and 2006
She lives on the edge of the Mojave Desert, from which she draws inspiration, and maintains an intensely personal web site, Naked Dave.com, as the self-proclaimed "Angriest Woman in the World". The series, the artist and web site have been the subject of several academic and Pop culture articles in recent years including Professor Dora Ramirez-Dhoore's 2005 essay The Cyberborderland: Surfing the Web for Xicanidad in the academic journal, Chicana/Latina Studies, MALCS: Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and Naked Dave by Heidi MacDonald on her weblog, The Beat - The News Blog of Comics Culture, February 18, 2005. A documentary short film, Naked Dave was made about her artistic obsessions by film makers Alex Schaffert and David Callaghan in 2004.
