"The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it." - Susan Sontag (2003)
Lisa Golightly artistic career began with photography. Her father was a painter, and though she grew up exposed to his practice, she discovered her appreciation for photography at an early age. However, while working on her Fine Art Photography and Photojournalism BFA, she found her way back to painting, developing an artistic practice which marries a deep technical and theoretical understanding of photography with painting. "As straightforward as it may sound, I have fallen in love with the brush, the color, the intimate experience of painting and creating my own world."
Today, Golightly's artistic practice still begins with photography. She first scours the internet and estate sales for bundles of anonymous decades-old photography and film. From there, she reframes, rebuilds and reimagines existing subjects of these forgotten photos in the terms of her own memory. Working with acrylic and high gloss enamel, and painting in a distinct painterly style, always allowing the paint to pool and move, she references impressionism, pointillism, as well as the oeuvre of Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd to create paintings that are both anonymous and inherently personal in nature.
In the process of finding and choosing the photographs from which Golightly works, anonymity is key; though it would be easy to assume that her work begins with her own family photos due to the way in which her painting style conjures a sense of intimacy and nostalgia, she purposefully chooses photos without a known story, context, time or place. She says, "The images are all found images, so they likely do come from all over, and they are not specific to a time or place. The images I'm drawn to, if I really dig in, relate to something I've experienced or a memory or family photographs. There's definitely a personal level to it but also enough distance from the source image that I'm able to kind of like play with it and twist it a little more that I would with my own, personal imagery." The resulting work straddles the line between the familiar and the anonymous, creating an uncanny gray area on which we can all find some part of ourselves, our history or our memory.
Her paintings differ significantly from the original images she draws from. She exaggerates light and color in a way that recalls old film photography, painting in pastel, washed out palettes that favors overexposed film. Part of Golightly's process is removing excess detail she feels draws away from the overall images, often using Photoshop and a sketch tool to digitally amend the photo before painting. She may change a color, remove the background, and alter the subjects in order to enhance the imagery where her eye has found its focus, whether that's a young boy exhibiting his toy airplane, a woman plucking a flower from a garden, or a man on a trail horse looking directly at the viewer. Instead, Golightly "get[s] to put in details with paint and movement." Subsequently, these paintings are more an exploration of memory than a visual reproduction of film photography, a bricolage of truth, interpretation and memory.
"My paintings seek to capture attempts to freeze moments and the inherent flaws in doing so. While my work often contains a sense of stillness and quiet found in photos, memory is in constant motion, changing, evolving or disappearing. My work explores this unstable and easily altered medium we so heavily rely on. Ultimately, I attempt to discover if these absences of details allow for the images to resonate with more clarity and depth."
Golightly's work probes the myth of photographic truth because it is predicated on the subjectivity of photography as she seeks to capture the universal experience of memory and nostalgia. The original photograph she works from, its subject, context, history, and intention are far less essential than her own memory and experience, and the ways these memories and experiences connect to those who view her work. Though a photograph is commonly regarded as a true and accurate documentation of a point in time due to photography's scientific origins in chemistry and optics, really every photograph is an act amidst a complex structure of choices and contexts, all of which influence and define the photograph before, during, and after its production. Photos are always constructions, may they be staged or authentic, and the same photo means different things to different people. By choosing images stripped of their original context and transforming them into paintings with traditional brush strokes, Golightly shatters the aura of photographic truth, exposing and transcending the nature of her materials.
Golightly further explores the relations between memory, physical distance and the passage of time in this most recent body of work. Her method yields works that mimic memory, rather than how the photograph captured a now anonymous moment in time, in order to explore how time and place effect memory. The result is works that capture the act of suspending time and the innate flaws in doing so. These works also explore the sense of collective memory, and the universal nature of human experience. Golightly comments that when procuring old photographs, "Strangely, a lot of times it's like 'Oh that could have been my family.' It's fascinating how a lot of images are something we all have, certain things, times or places that we all document similarly."
Born in Eugene, Oregon, Lisa Golightly studied at the University of Arizona where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fine Art Photography and Photojournalism in 1996. Solo exhibitions include Marking Time, George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2020), Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle, WA (2020), Recent paintings, Clove and Creek, Kingston, New York (2018), If Only For A Little While, Good Eye Gallery, Los Angeles CA (2016), and more. Her work has been reviewed in Ppaper Magazine, Luxe Interior and Designs, The Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She has participated in art fairs including the Venice Art Walk in Venice Beach, California. Her art was selected for a promotional campaign in London, England in celebration of International Women's Day. She was also chosen to produce an album cover and interior art for musician Alec Lytle. Golightly lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she spends her days in the old carriage garage-turned-studio in the back yard of her 100-year-old home.