Born in Portland, Oregon., daughter of the first male beautician in the State of Oregon and a glamour girl beautician/business maven, Candice Laxton shunned the family business and attended art school. Graduating about the time Motorola introduced the first mobile phone to the United States, Laxton landed her first ad agency job at Adworks, by systematically making her way down the alphabetized ad agency listings in the Yellow Pages—presumably for a girl she also had a great portfolio and some pretty decent fast-talking creative ideas.
Laxton's early career was spent working at various advertising agencies and as an enthusiastic team player on local Fortune 500 creative services teams in Seattle, Washington. Most notable Adworks (the most fun) and later, Weyerhaeuser and Microsoft. Laxton left Seattle in 1998 and moved to Silicon Valley where she worked as a creative director for Adobe, Luminant Worldwide and was the managing principal and creative director/brand strategist for Abacus Brand Marketing. Upon her return to Portland, Oregon in 2006, Laxton has provided brand consulting and creative strategy to businesses and has worked as an employee for TacticalPoint Media and for Paychex in product marketing.
As an Artist, Laxton has been heavily influenced by a career in the graphic arts and advertising and by the artists and designers of the Bauhaus; most notably Paul Klee and Walter Gropius. For Gropius, expressionism was the voicing of a new world; a world of strong colors, organic forms and spiritual associations.
Laxton World expressionism is filled with electric color, nubby textures, organic forms and the magic of light. The images voice her delight with a screen full of playful pixels and an incontrovertible interest in faces, places, and the birds and the trees. She makes tangible the inside of her head, by mixing representations of amusement, unlikely content, with a tincture of divine light.
As a creative director, brand strategist, Laxton provides straight up brand strategy and brand specific creative to business clients wanting to build a brand strategy platform. As an experienced brand strategist and professionally trained graphic designer, she combines creativity with strategic thinking and the power of design to visually communicate an organization's brand, business objectives and marketing goals.