Robert Lucy

Lives and works in Woodstock, NY, USA

Artist statement

Artist Statement – Paradise After years of focusing solely on painting, I have brought colored pencil drawing back to the center of my practice with a drawing suite entitled PARADISE. These portraits feature beautiful men, taken from vintage photos, set into fantastic landscapes, and adorned with nature elements. The images are colorful, daring, and seductive. They continue my exploration of the surreal: mushrooms become hats, landscapes become gowns, men wear octopi as headdresses and flowers as neckties, fanciful jewelry and piercings appear. The subjects are bit like paper dolls in the multiverse. This body of work is in part a response to the novel, To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, which takes place in one house in Washington Square, NYC, in the past, present and future. As a gay man who grew up in a religious and military household, in a time of repression and in a place of strict conformity, the novel’s imagined 19th century New York, where love and marriage between same-sex couples was not only accepted, but in accord with the religious belief system of the time, inspired me to seek my own place of belonging. The suite of drawings answers the question: what would freedom look like for me? With PARADISE, I re-create the past, combining it with the present and infusing it with my imagination and desires, to create a new visual history of the world I want to inhabit. Paradise, imagines a reality where queerness isn’t aberrant, but a beautiful part of nature.

Artwork