When he was down on his luck, Scott Laufer returned to his childhood passion. He spoke to BuzzFeed News about how he turned his life around.
As a child in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, Scott Laufer had a passion for drawing, but his interest in art disappeared when he became a teenager.
After graduating high school, Laufer enrolled in state university, but dropped out after a semester and moved to California to find his fortune. He had “no money, no friends and no direction”.
A couple of years later, his life hit rock bottom as he got fired from his job “at a retail tech giant” just days after signing the lease on a studio apartment in Los Feliz.
Recalling that time, Laufer told BuzzFeed News: “I can remember times when I would go a week on barely more than a tub of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, saving every dollar I had for rent.
“My phone got cut off every month. My lights got cut off, not to mention the bedbugs and roaches. Worst of all, I was alone.”
Jory Cordy
During his first four years in LA, he flew home only a few times, but on each visit he witnessed his young sister’s growing interest in art.
“At some point in our childhood my younger sister picked up drawing basically where I had left off,” he said.
It was then that Laufer began contemplating a return to his childhood passion.
In the end it was his mother who convinced him to start painting again. “I was very hesitant, but she sent me a set of paints and I gave it a shot,” he recalled.
Jory Cordy
Laufer initially hated the medium he had abandoned, but was determined not to let it beat him again. “I felt like the only thing I could start to control in my life was the paint,” he recalled. So for the next year or two he took painting up as a hobby.
As his passion for art returned, Laufer found a new set of friends for the first time since moving to LA, and they actively encouraged his hobby.
In December 2012, he returned to Bellefonte for a month, bringing with him his paints and a copy of How to Paint Like the Old Masters. Using two of his four siblings as models, he produced these paintings:
Scott Laufer
