LIZZY LUNDAY: @LIZZYLUNDAY

Every artist has a story of how they became an artist. What was your earliest memory surrounding artwork? And was there a moment it clicked that you would be an artist, or has it never been a question?

I’ve always been naturally drawn towards art and art-making. As a kid I was really inspired by my grandfather in Kentucky. He had to quit school at 15 to help make money for his family after his father died. After serving time in the Navy he started working on the assembly line at International Harvester, a company that manufactured tractors and trucks, and worked his way up from there. But he was also an incredibly talented artist. He taught himself how to draw, paint, build and play instruments, and he taught photography classes during his retirement. Some of my earliest memories are asking him to draw me various animals and of me sneaking into his computer room to use his fancy double-sided markers.

I moved to the Northern Virginia/DC area from Kentucky when I was 11 years old, which gave me valuable access to museums and arts organizations as I grew up. I think the moment it ‘clicked’ that I was going to take making art seriously was in high school when I started skipping my other classes to go to the art room. My art teacher wasn’t too thrilled about it, but she would usually let me stay. She was stern and always pushed me, and it was really important that I had an art teacher like that during my teenage years. There’s not so much talk about being an artist as a career choice as a kid, so I think it took me a little while to realize that it was actually an option. Thankfully my parents were and are very supportive of it.

Another really big ‘click’ moment for me was when my University of Miami painting professor suggested I look at Francis Bacon. Around the same time, I was walking along the road and noticed a newspaper on the ground with Jenny Saville’s Atonement Studies (Panel 2) on the cover, so I drove to West Palm Beach to see the show at the Norton Museum. I hadn’t had much foundation in art history or contemporary art by the time I had gotten to UM, and when I was finally exposed to the work of artists like Bacon and Saville, it felt like something I had always been looking for. Works like theirs set something off in me—this very physical, bodily reaction to these very physical and bodily works, like a pit in my stomach. Their works very much center around the figure, but also go beyond pure representation through manipulation and distortion to exude an intimate and psychological impact on the viewer. My experience with works like these really opened up my world to the possibilities of paint, which pushed me forward.

How were you trained? Can you tell us a bit about your journey to where you are now?

With regard to my training, I have some objectively “bad” habits because my first painted portraits were born from a lot of trial and error on my own, sitting on my bedroom floor when I was about 16. I later took a few different classes through a local arts non-profit, including one oil painting class, and I had such a hard time going from the quickness and freshness of acrylic to the slow-drying and easily-muddied oil paint, that I vowed to never use oil again. I’m a pretty stubborn person, and was an even more dramatic teenager.

When I got to University of Miami my sophomore year of college, they had everyone work in oil. As it turns out, I ended up falling in love with oil painting. Since then, it’s really taken the front seat in anything I’ve made over the past seven years. But I think there’s still a big part of me that tends to treat oil in some ways like acrylic. I’m still conditioned to make a lot of separate brush strokes and patches of color, so some paintings tend to be mistaken for acrylic.

In the bulk of my paintings I’m working from photographs, and for a long time I felt I was constrained to the literal representation of them. When I started my MFA at Pratt in the fall of 2017, one of my main goals was to be able to liberate myself from this attachment. There was so much trial and error that sometimes I thought I was losing my mind, and most of what I made that first year I’ve thrown out or painted over (and, of course, deleted from Instagram). But it was really important for me to force myself through this really uncomfortable detachment process and allow the paintings to go where the paintings want to go, rather than where the image tells them to go. I still use images, of course, but they’re used as a foundation or jumping-off point rather than the exact blueprint.

Can you tell us a bit about your process, and how each of your artwork comes to be?

I’m really thankful for the invention of the smartphone during my lifetime because my process is so heavily based around my ability to create source material on an almost constant basis. I save everything on my phone that catches my eye. A scene on television, celebrity photos on the internet, piles of garbage on the sidewalk, the sky. Initially I can’t really explain what it is that I’m looking for, but it tends to show up in the work.

I have a few folders on my phone and laptop where I keep all of these images to have on-hand. For a smaller painting I may work from them directly, or I’ll digitally collage a few together on an app. Throughout the process of painting, I’ll usually get stuck, and I’ll take an image of the painting and manipulate it further on my phone before I decide what to do next.

Often I’ll end up doing this to the point where the painting almost completely changes to something else entirely. Covering-up is a big part of my process, as well as the chance of what colors from previous renderings end up showing through in the end. I like to see bits and pieces of each stage, which is why you’ll often see lines leftover from me trying to place different figures. If a painting I’m working on is coming along too easily, it becomes very boring for me. I always have to break it and drive myself crazy trying to solve the puzzle I created for myself.