Lola Reed is a 22-year-old painter currently pursuing her BFA at the California College of Arts. She has been living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area for her entire life.
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My practice emerges from an insistence on the body—its horrors, its transparencies, its humor. Raised in the Bay Area and shaped by an early devotion to portraiture, I quickly moved beyond likeness to the fragile architectures of bodies. As a collector of images, I create a visual language that slips between anatomy and allegory. What it means to be both a body and a mind, to watch one’s flesh move independently from one's consiousness, to abject from an unescapable vessel.
I render flesh with a softness that borders on devotional: pastel viscera, translucent skin, decay, impermanence, truth. Juxtaposing vulnerability and violence, cuteness and gore, innocence and the raw mechanics of flesh. I sort through a thick sludge of media to sanctify and immortalize fleeting images of the digital landscape. Each painting is a product of its time, shaped by the slow festering of the modern consciousness.
By placing these ephemeral elements alongside the unignorable materiality of flesh, I seek recontextualize the gaze in a time where everything is visible, yet nothing is truly seen. In my paintings, the interior is made exterior, acknowledging the weight and warmth of living forms, and reconsidering the embodied realities that tether us to the world.
I always find myself returning to the body: vulnerable, visceral, luminous. Offering flesh, fur, impermanence—as antidote, as truth, as clarity, as lived, felt reality.