Bio

Here is a brief history of who I am and how I got here. I was born to a teacher and a chef in San Fransisco in the early eighties. The chef, my father, always loved to paint and one day whilst painting, his tiny daughter (that would be me) wanted to get in on the action. My dad had me paint a bowl of flowers (in the hopes of getting me to quit pestering him, bless his heart). He likes to tell me that he saw a light go on on my face when it suddenly clicked how the paint worked and how to translate what I was looking at onto the canvas. I’ve been painting and making art ever since. 

When my parents divorced, I moved with my mother and brother to Moorpark, a suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where my grandparents lived close by. My grandmother regularly drove me to painting classes once a week and made chicken and dumplings for me after class until my mom would come pick me up and take me home. Let me tell you, those were some amazing, life-changing dumplings. 

When it suddenly came time to make a decision about college and what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I decided to follow my brother to Chicago and study animation and fine art at SAIC (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago). By the time I received my BFA in 2006, I had learned that trying to pick your career path at eighteen with no experience in your dream profession can be a foolish enterprise. In short, animation turned out to be not so much for me. 

I moved back to Moorpark after college, and started pursuing a different career path. I took some classes in graphic design, and started learning how to illustrate in vector. I started out working for one of my teachers in her private design business, and eventually got a job working with Saputo Design. I started to expand my skills and fell in love with hand-lettering, and this pretty much brings me to where I am now. I currently live in Venice, and work as a freelancer out of a tiny woodland studio in Topanga Canyon. When I am not designing or illustrating like a maniac, I am painting in my studio, or snuggled up in my Venice bungalow with my sweetheart. 

As an artist in general, the most important thing to me is to give everything I create it’s own distinct personality and unique story. As a designer and illustrator, I tend to create things that are whimsical with an edge, or old-fashioned with a modern twist. I draw a lot of my inspiration from styles found in printmaking, such as woodcuts, etchings, and screenprints. I sometimes like to work in a painterly style to give my work a more hand-crafted look. 

As is the case with illustration and design work, my work is heavily influenced by the needs of my clients. I like to think of myself as a chameleon artist; I adapt my work as needed, but there is always a little something of myself in the work I create. 

Artist Statement

When I started really pursuing illustration and design as a profession, I took a long break from painting. I wasn’t at the level that I wanted to be at as a painter, and I was having difficulty painting from the heart while I was also trying to make a living as an artist. A few years ago, I went to New Mexico to visit and draw in Georgia O’Keefe’s house in Abiquiu. The experience was life changing. About a month after I got back, I started to paint again. I decided to work only in black and white. Color felt distracting, and maybe I was inspired by Miss O’Keefe and her black kimonos and the minimalism I saw in her home. It took a while to figure out why I was painting what I was painting. These days, I like to think of them as the grey ladies. 

I’m fascinated with the concept of the “nymphet” from Nabokov’s Lolita. The character of Humbert Humbert describes how this childlike and girlish state is something short-lived, and how in grown women there is only a mere shadow of it. In the end, he realizes (tragically, and too late) that this shadow is what makes a woman who she is; it manifests a beauty that stays with her for the rest of her life. My work is a celebration of that shadow.

I like to think about who a woman is on the inside, and capture with paint a tiny part of her personality and spirit. Sometimes, these women are based on and named after people I know. Sometimes they are women I will never get to meet, including the women in my family that came before me. And then sometimes, they are based on characters in stories that I love. I paint the truth I find in fantasy. I paint and draw because I love it and because I want to create something that I think is beautiful. I think femininity is beautiful, and I always do my best to paint from a feminine experience. 

Contact

For freelance inquiries, commissions, or general questions, please email. 

georgialange@gmail.com