I first met Robert Lucy as co-creator (with his longtime partner Chris Wells) of The Secret City, their stupendous monthly celebration of secular artistic mindfulness, with the apt tagline, “We Worship Art.” I instantly became a huge fan and started volunteering my time to the organization. And I also learned that Lucy not only has great taste in art (he curates and presents the visual artist at every “service”) but he himself is a sought-after fine artist and portraitist. As reproductions of his paintings make very clear in our Ideablog posts this week, Lucy is enormously gifted at capturing likenesses of animals (and human animals) that evoke smiles and deep identification—while also turning them into glorious pop-icons. What’s also outstanding is his ability to convey the monumental emotional significance that these animals have to their commissioning humans—no matter if they are actually teacup creatures off the canvas. We invited Lucy to contribute to our “Dog & Pony Shows” theme, because we think he “puts on the dog” better than any artist we have seen.
~Victoria C. Rowan, Ideasmyth Creatix-in-Chief
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The more the merrier…
This was a fantastic assignment and a great gig: a friend, who’s a successful screenwriter and owns a really great house in Santa Monica Canyon, contacted me with an idea. She and her husband and family are major dog lovers – and she asked me to paint their family’s dogs, past and present: ALL FIVE OF THEM!
She really liked my colorful, abstract backgrounds and, while I was out in LA, I visited the house and took pictures of the room and got samples of the wall colors.
The portraits would hang in a group on the same wall so the challenge was to create 5 portraits with 5 different backgrounds that looked great individually and went well together. (Also, two of the portraits included cropped details of her children, which was also a cool twist on the theme.)
I loved this challenge—creating a unified collection of portraits and, especially, creating a wall to honor all the beloved animals in our lives.
See more of Robert’s Featured Creative posts on our Ideablog
~~~Robert Lucy has been painting and drawing professionally for over 25 years, and loving animals for my whole life. He has a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he lived for 15 years and made a reputation for himself painting still lifes, landscapes, portraits and colored pencil drawings. He grew up in St. Louis, and after leaving Chicago spent several years on the Oregon Coast. In 2006 he moved to NYC, and most recently has moved his home and studio to Woodstock, NY in the Catskill Mountains.
