I’m a Los Angeles based artist and illustrator. I like music, iced lattes, and my big-headed pit bull.
Your characters look like they are suspended in a permanent after-school hour. What emotional age do you think your drawings live in?
I never thought about my characters in that way, but you’re kind of right haha, that they live in an after-school hour universe. I wouldn’t say I draw from a specific emotional age; my drawings live in the now. My work can sometimes act as a diary entry, there are symbols, and writing that reflect what I’m currently feeling, or represent something that has happened to me recently.With one of the drawings that you asked me to send over, the one with 2 girls one standing up and the other sitting down. I was actually drawing the day my MacBook died. But I was having fun that day I forgot, only to stress about it the next day.
Webcore often romanticizes digital decay and emotional oversharing. And the Internet was untamed back then. Today’s web culture accelerates trends at an almost violent speed. How do you resist becoming aestheticized into a category?
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to be put into a category as long as it’s not suffocating and my work doesn’t become a fad. I think there’s a style of art that I can be grouped with other artists and I’m okay with that.I don’t worry that much at the end of the day I’m having fun making things, and I have no control over how my work exists in the world or the internet.
There’s something archival about your drawings, like screenshots from a forgotten MySpace layout. Are you consciously preserving a disappearing digital mood?
Maybe, I never thought about my work as archival or a preservation of a digital mood. I’m preserving my current mood within my body of work. I know a lot of artists says this, but for me, art is an outlet for processing my life. I draw because I can’t put certain feelings into words. With the repeated color palette I use I definitely see the MySpace correlation, other people have said that about my work too.
Official IG page of Lucy Levine, tap chana_003
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