Florentina Looper is an American artist known for her porcelain functional art and intricate underglaze paintings. Trained as a classical canvas painter, she now merges fine art and utility by creating original figurative and collage-style works on hand-sculpted porcelain. Each piece is designed to be used, cherished, and to transform everyday moments into aesthetic experiences.

In 2022, she left the corporate world to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a full-time artist. What began in a small basement studio has since grown into a thriving ceramics practice, with her work now held in thousands of private collections across the United States and around the world.

Artist’s Statement

I want my art to be elegant, if not beautifully strange, and always capable of taking a viewer’s breath away. Each piece I create is intended as an heirloom, to carry a quiet magic past my own lifetime. My aesthetic is shaped by the luminous brushwork of the 19th-century Impressionists, the intricate linework of Victorian literary illustration, the symbolism of Medieval mysticism and iconography, and the romantic figurativism of the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau.

I am drawn to the timeless beauty of goddesses and nymphs, the symmetry and vitality of fresh blooms, the innocence of young animals. Yet I rarely portray them unblemished. Instead, I encourage and allow visual imperfections occurring by my hand and the alchemy of the kiln, so the work bears witness to both splendor and impermanence. In this way, my art becomes an act of creative defiance while remaining a reverent ode to the inevitability of entropy.

This dialogue between beauty and impermanence also extends to my Nostalgia Collection, where I immortalize humble, everyday objects: a well-used chair, an old perfume bottle, a toy from childhood. These subjects, often overlooked, are elevated through porcelain and color into quiet monuments of memory. Just as with my mythic and figurative works, they carry the tension between reverence and imperfection, inviting the viewer to linger in the bittersweet space where past and present meet.

Through sculpting, color, and precious metal, I’ve finally found an outlet for the creative madness that once felt like torment. My work is an attempt to translate a deep, aching longing for a fairytale world, its beauty, mystery, and tenderness, into something tangible that others can experience with me.