Art, Identity, and the Human Experience

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Go powering the scenes with Omar Lawson, an fascinating new expertise whose unique tactic to portraiture is capturing the artwork world’s awareness.

Q&A with Omar Lawson, mixed media artist

The to start with matter you detect about Omar Lawson’s artwork is the grand scale. At six toes tall, his portraits have a weight and existence all their possess.

Untitled work by Omar Lawson
Untitled get the job done by Omar Lawson (Combined Media, 6’ x 5’)

But it promptly gets to be evident that Lawson’s portraits are not only lifestyle-sized they are bigger than lifetime. His bold use of colour and dynamic composition transports the viewer from an art gallery into a shared human practical experience. Lawson’s portraits simultaneously seize an individual’s exclusive id and the common human experience.


Q&A with Omar Lawson

In this brief Q&A, we share a glimpse into Omar Lawson’s function and technique to portraiture. To get a deeper dive, look at out the recording of our recent Illuminate party, in which we peeked inside Lawson’s studio and talked about his daily life, artwork, and doing the job methods.

Q: What do you uncover most persuasive about portray portraits?

Making one thing that quite a few people can determine with—while also figuring out there’s an specific out there who perceives my creation as a illustration of their identity—is unbelievably fulfilling. Even though portraiture headlines my paintings, the concentrate is always on the collective narrative.

Omar Lawson explores identity and the human experience in his portraiture

Q: You paint with oils, acrylics, and collaged factors. What are the added benefits and troubles of every single medium and how do you make your mind up which to use for a painting?

The rationale I do the job in combined media is so that I can skip more than all the worries and shortcomings of each and every medium and definitely perform to their strengths. I exclusively paint the skin and hair with oils simply because the gradual dry time lets me to truly define the actual physical qualities of my styles which is important to portraying their identities as folks. On the other hand, the mediums that I employed to generate the clothes and spaces that my figures occupy are chosen the moment that I make your mind up to perform on them.

Each individual final decision informs the next and even nevertheless doing work this way can make each individual portray experience like a visual test, it’s my way of engaging with the perform and continuing to make improvements to my decision generating expertise.

Q: What is anything new you are looking to examine in your artwork?

I’ve begun to integrate perforated or “dotted” traces into my function. These are generally used in early childhood training to teach children how to compose letters and symbols that they will continue on to use through their schooling and daily life.

A life-sized portrait by Omar Lawson, mixed media artist
Untitled function by Omar Lawson (Mixed Media, 6’ x 4’)

I strategy to use the perforated line in my operate as a vehicle for my commentary on the instruction that we obtain outside the house of the college process within just principles these types of as society, societal norms, and nuanced ordeals.


For a lot more from Omar Lawson, watch a replay of Making Artwork That Sparks Discussion, an online party exclusively for Artists Network members.

Examine additional about Omar Lawson’s Liquitex artist residency or follow him on TikTok.

Meet Omar Lawson, mixed media artist, in our next Illuminate event for Artists Network members

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