Welcome by Lindsey Warren
8"x10" ($24) | 11"x14" ($60) | 16"x20" ($240) | 20"x24" ($600) | 30"x40" ($2400)
If you caught our Saturday missive, featuring a cozy Q+A sesh and studio tour, then you know a) we’re obsessed with Lindsey Warren’s work, and b) we’re terrible at keeping secrets. In our newsletter we teased upcoming artwork from the LA-based painter, and now the moment has arrived to officially introduce Warren’s second limited-edition print. Like her first edition, Northeast LA, this new piece is a love letter to light, making a strong case for her next-level mastery when it comes to capturing the special spectacle of a SoCal sunset. It also underscores her eye for color subtleties, and her emphasis on shape, giving us another reason to want to spend all our time in the La La Land of Warren’s work. Welcome to Welcome.
A native Angeleno, Warren’s been focused on LA’s extraordinary light and idiosyncratic enclaves since returning to the city in 2015. For artistic fodder, she taps into her everyday experiences, observing the changing tableaux of LA’s landscape. Her profound relationship to the area plays out in the visual plane as highly personalized portrayals, almost intimate in ambiance—something you might not expect from largely environmental representations like Welcome ...
Welcome is just that—welcoming. Warren invites you into this urban vista by quietly imbuing the work with a warm, affectionate aura, a kind of cozy confidentiality only a longtime resident could convey. It’s hard to describe because it’s (brilliantly) not heavy-handed, but the effect has a lot to do with Warren's sensitivity to slippery atmospheric qualities, and her ability to surface them in her paintings. Her mindful balance of specific color selections, for instance, creates a precise picture. In Welcome, the sunset’s color scheme has a mildly 80s air, a little Miami Vice (LA Vice?) flashiness juxtaposed with the industrial gray rooftops bespeckled by ACs. Another thoughtful point of contrast: the dark green palms popping up between the buildings and the sloping hillside in the horizon, reminders that LA, for all its big city bustle, is inflected by natural wonder.
Warren tinkers until she’s translated a moment in time to oil on canvas. She systematically adds and subtracts details as she paints, playing with color and proportion until the image feels in line with her own perception, until she’s accessed that truth that resides in that liminal space between empirical fact and ethereality. As a result, Welcome is like dipping into a memory, more a manifestation of perceived experience than something concrete. What it’ll bring to your walls won’t be like anything else in your collection.
Sound like something you’d be into? Take home a limited-edition print of Warren’s Welcome today. And if you’ll be in the LA area this April, be sure to stop by Keystone Art Space in Lincoln Heights to check out Warren’s solo show, Native, up the 13th through the 21st.
With art for everyone,
Jen Bekman + Team 20x200
