Today we’d like to introduce you to Lucy Luckovich.
Hi Lucy, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers.
My parents and my three older siblings are all very talented artists, so from a very young age, I was exposed to and surrounded by drawing and painting. All throughout middle and high school I was in all of the art classes I could take, and when it was time to go to college, I started attending Georgia State University with a focus on graphic design. I chose graphic design because, at the time, studying painting seemed ridiculous and unrealistic.
I was a freshman when the Covid-19 pandemic took over, and while I was at home that summer I began painting every single day. I started showing my work in the fall of 2020 at various pop-up shows in warehouses, bars, and even clothing stores. I tried to show it to anyone who would look at it. Eventually, I changed my major to a B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting when I knew I was ready to take my art career seriously.
In March of 2021, I was invited to my first gallery group show at Cat Eye Creative where I began showing regularly over the next couple of years. After my first solo show ‘Pop My Cherry!’ in April of 2023, I started getting invited to show work in group shows in New York and was eventually asked to have a solo show at the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art which opens up on April 6th, 2024!
The show is called ‘Initial Object’ and will be up until June 16th. I think my ultimate goal in life is to have the ability to create art every single day, and at the moment that’s what I’m doing which is pretty surreal. In the fall I will be attending Rhode Island School of Design to pursue my M.F.A. in Painting, and I couldn’t be more excited!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think that pursuing a career in art can be difficult in general because you are often your own marketing department, finance management, and sales team, and you are in charge of making the product from start to finish, so it is a lot of different components to balance at least when you are first starting out. Other than that, the entire journey can become a reflection of your self-worth.
At least that is something I’ve personally struggled with quite a bit. If I don’t feel successful, I tend to make it very personal and tell myself that I’m not focused enough or that I’m a bad artist. It’s sort of an up-and-down thing; I’ll finish a painting, sell a piece of my work, or attend an opening, and I feel on top of the world for a little bit, but then the next day I’ll be back to self-flagellation in the studio telling myself I’m a failure.
Although it can be really tough sometimes, I am ultimately just extremely grateful I get to make art in the first place. Painting is my favorite thing to do. I’m also a Capricorn and I have a masochistic streak, so I think being hard on myself really motivates me…
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am obsessed with thinking about my identity as a woman, specifically a young woman. I make a lot of paintings about my experience. I also spent a lot of time growing up on the internet, so that definitely influences my work quite a lot too. I think about the way I coped with various things by scrolling on Tumblr as a child, and the different things I encountered and what resonated.
The idea of ‘Lolita’ has been a long-standing reference point in my work as I grew up reading her name on Tumblr blogs and hearing it in music and not really understanding the context of what I was consuming. That’s another thing I spend a lot of time unpacking in the work is the idea of images and their context.
Especially as young women and girls we are constantly proliferating our own image or consuming other images of women, and I wonder how that has impacted our little monkey brains. I use objects a lot in my paintings as stand-ins for women or girls in order to talk about objectification and the dilution of a concept through images.
At the same time as I feel like I am meditating on all of these themes, I love painting, and I love to create beautiful paintings, so a big part of the work is also creating an impressive beautiful image. Oil painting is fun because it seems like an endless mountain I can scale and learn more about and grow more accustomed to. There are centuries of oil painting history and techniques I can consume which is super awesome and exciting.
What matters most to you? Why?
I think my family matters most to me. I’m very concerned about making them proud. I am really close with my immediate family, and I am very grateful for everything they’ve done for me. My parents have put a lot of faith in me and supported me in my pursuit of an artistic career, so I really don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t think they’d really be that upset even if I failed because they’re awesome.
Contact Info:
- Website: lucyluckovichart.com
- Instagram: @lucyluckovich
Image Credits
Brayan Enriquez
