Lily Prince
Hudson Valley / Nashville
Your Website
www.lilyprince.com
Your Social Media:
Instagram
How would you describe your work?
My paintings and drawings are all based on pieces and slices of places I travel to combined with invented spaces. They are made up of patterned, abstract, gestural mark making, which represents and corresponds to the throbbing, pulsating energy I feel from nature, all set within an illusionistic deep space. My work has become more psychedelic and dreamy recently and leans a bit more in an emotional and psychological direction of expression.
What inspires you?
Nature and beautiful landscape spaces inspire me to create because they make me feel happy to be alive.
Can you speak about your process?
I travel to places of particular visual and cultural interest to me, the American west and Italy to name a couple of places I return to repeatedly. I begin to scout out a view that has meaning to me, that challenges and intrigues me, and that scares me in its complexity. I begin exploring through plein air drawing, starting with small drawings done in black marker. I usually move on to oil pastel larger plein air drawings before moving inside to my studio where I take pieces of drawings and put them together, often from memory and combined with invention, to start acrylic paintings on canvas or watercolor and gouache paintings on paper. My color is invented and often completely arbitrary and is used to create exaggerated mood rather than an observational expression of place.
How did you become interested in art?
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of being about 3 and 4 years old and sitting and drawing with oil pastels next to my mom, who used to make things. She wasn’t a professional artist but was always creating something and went through many phases of art making when I was growing up. We’d sit together for hours engaged in our work and it was the beginning of my art training.
Do you have any favorite artists, movies, or books?
I have so many favorite artists, too many to include all but to name just a few: Bonnard and Vuillard; Joan Mitchell; Per Kirkeby; Andy Goldsworthy; Munch; Kusama; van Gogh; Martin Puryear; Hilma af Klint and Judy Pfaff.
Favorite books include: Anything by Willa Cather, especially “My Antonia”, and George Eliot, especially “Middlemarch”, and “Member of the Wedding” by Carson McCullers, some Dickens and Tolstoy.
Do you have any advice for young artists?
Do everything you can to turn off the negative inner critic, which gets in the way and can ultimately stop a young artist from continuing on their path. The best way that I’ve found is to make tons of work and make it quickly. Make so much work that your head is spinning and you don’t have time to be critical. And when you’ve made 1,000 pieces, who cares if many of them should be tossed. There will remain a whole bunch that prove themselves to be worthy of continued exploration and lead you to where you need to be.
AND
Don’t pay too much attention, if at all, to what anyone else is doing. Have faith your instincts are right and follow your own path.
AND
Find the right balance between isolation and community—both are necessary but understanding the timing of them is significant.
