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Lisa Golightly's artistic career began with photography. Her father was a painter, and though she grew up exposed to his practice, she discovered her appreciation for photography at an early age. However, while working on her Fine Art Photography and Photojournalism BFA, she found her way back to painting, developing an artistic practice which marries a deep technical and theoretical understanding of photography with painting. "As straightforward as it may sound, I have fallen in love with the brush, the color, the intimate experience of painting and creating my own world."
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Today, Golightly's artistic practice still begins with photography. She first scours the internet and estate sales for bundles of anonymous old photography and film. Then, she reframes, rebuilds and reimagines existing subjects of these forgotten photos in the terms of her own memory. She exaggerates light and color in a way that recalls old film photography, painting in pastel, washed out palettes that mimic overexposed film. Working with acrylic, and painting in a distinct painterly style, she references impressionism, pointillism, as well as the oeuvre of Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd to create paintings that are both anonymous and inherently personal in nature. Golightly's work straddles the line between the familiar and the anonymous, creating an uncanny gray area in which we can all find some part of ourselves, our history or our memory.
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Golightly further explores the relations between memory, physical distance and the passage of time in this body of work. These paintings are more an exploration of memory than a visual reproduction of film photography. They are a bricolage of truth, interpretation and memory that capture the act of suspending time and the innate flaws in doing so. These works also explore the sense of collective memory, and the universal nature of human experience. Golightly comments that when procuring old photographs, "Strangely, a lot of times it's like 'Oh that could have been my family.' It's fascinating how a lot of images are something we all have, certain things, times or places that we all document similarly."
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NEAR AND FAR: LISA GOLIGHTLY
Past viewing_room
