Liza Lou is one of my favorite artists. She was born in 1969 in NYC, but currently works in Durban, South Africa, overseeing a group of local beaders in the creation of largescale beaded works. When asked if art is a kind of comfort blanket, Liza Lou responded,
Yes, definitely. I think it gives a tremendous sense of purpose. It’s a way of seeing the world; it’s a way of reinventing the world. It gives a sense of power over matter, over what it is, over what it is you’re looking at. It’s really exciting to be able to decide you want to see things in a certain way and so you go ahead and do that. And it really doesn’t require any money, just time and a lot of effort. That was something I latched onto early on. Even as a kid, being able to tap into the control that you have that no matter what’s going on around you, you can go into your room and make, or draw what you want to see even when, in the world around you, there’s nothing that you want to see. Even when everything’s so dark and so ugly, you can go into your room and make something. And on that page you have total control.
When Liza Lou was an art student at the San Francisco Art Institute, one professor whom she would later nickname ‘The Frogman’ chastised her for attaching glass beads to her abstract paintings. Liza recalls, “I was really, really hated for what I was doing…People would actually say, ‘I’m sorry, but that is not allowed’.” Instead of conforming, Liza dropped out and got a studio in Los Angeles. She worked as a waitress and began work on her first major artwork, Kitchen (1991-95). The piece is a life-size replica of a suburban kitchen, but it sparkles, because every surface has been covered with millions of hand-glued glass beads. Liza said she wanted to transform an ordinary kitchen, a place typically associated with domestic toil, “into something as dazzling as Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice.”
