The Lardner Report

Four LA artists share how their work has changed.

At its best, art helps us interpret the world around us. Often without words, usually in a subconscious level, art can help us celebrate what’s beautiful, and find beauty in things we may have thought mundane, or even ugly.

It can also call attention to struggles we aren’t aware of, and help us put context to the stuggles we know all too well. Art can educate us, elucidate us, and make us mad. It can mystify, energize, and make us sad. But the truth is, every feeling art evokes comes from the mind, heart and soul of the artist.

So what happens when circumstances change so radically, that we all feel as if our world has been tossed upside down? Well that happened in 2020. And for a handful of artists who are close friends of mine, the events of the last year have changed them — and their art.

Our recent Zoom meeting confirmed it: we’re not the same, and nor is the art we create.

Suzanne is a Los Angeles-based painter and graphic designer who has gallery show experience and corporate exposure. Since Covid came into our lives, she’s pivoted from her colorful acrylic abstracts to simpler figurative line drawings in black and white.  She says the move is less labor intensive, and gives her way more instant gratification. Most of all, the experience of taking out a pad to simply draw is “more intimate.” The difference in style is striking. (See Pic #2)

Stephanie is a Venice-based artist who paints with photographs, with work also shown in galleries and corporate collections. She tells us since Covid, exhibitions seem so distant, inaccessible — that her desire, her hunger is to make art “for fulfillment,” to feed her soul. The pressure to “get it out there” is now a vague, unknown place. Stephanie says, “I just have to make art.” (See Pic #3)

(Pic #4) Left: “Bosch Redoux” by Lori Pond, pre-Covid. Right: Recent nature shoot, during Covid, LA Arboretum.

Lori is a Pasadena-based fine art photographer (one of the more adventurous artists I know) who says she’s now limiting herself to one low tech lens called Lens Baby. Until Covid, she’d typically explore radical new mediums and methods as a regular practice. She says she now simply relies on nature around her. (Pic #4)

For me, I want my art to became “more street.” More raw. I’d always been drawn to (photographing) images of urban decay, but now I want to MAKE them. There’s something satisfying about hitting a canvas hard, spraying paint without a plan, and ripping it in half when done. And I don’t think I need to dig too deep to figure out why.

So who knew? It’s called GRIEF.

In the end, my friends all concluded that much of what we are experiencing is based on the uncertainty of what lies ahead. We all admitted we are afraid and feeling vulnerable. Bottom line — in so many ways, we are grieving: the loss of our familiar routines, friends, habits, productivity, freedom to travel….and there’s the daunting task of re-defining who we are — because so much has changed around us.

Truth is, we know we’re not alone, and the good news is, experts say expressing ourselves through art is probably one of the the best ways to grieve. A colleague of ours reminds us that we have to trust that everything will be okay.

if you are not sure you are experiencing this uninvited sense of grief, read this sobering description below from Mashable / Culture this week:

“Grief is the type of thing you cannot know until you yourself suffer a loss so cataclysmic that it takes a part of you with it. Grief is an isolation so deep it separates your very being from the realm of reality, leaving you unreachable even when not technically alone. Grief knows no rules, defying the laws of physics itself, warping time-space so moments of distress last lifetimes while events from only days prior to your loss feel as though they happened in a different timeline, to a different person altogether. Grief comes in waves, the bouts of raw, skin-crawling agony interspersed with a deathly unfeeling, both jarringly juxtaposed against the unavoidable normalities of everyday life. 

In mourning, the world stops. But it also shambles on like it always has. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.”

For the full article: click here: apple.news/AECZG_jVvQLGJXXdjFexhOQ