Pastel Series With Birds
My pastel pictures are a series of boundaryless fields dreaming mystery.
Set between the archetype poles of an apocalypse and the garden they are attended to by a bird who oversees each world that it can fly away from.
One Disaster series features experiences form the City of Angels. I went to see tectonic fault lines north of Los Angeles just as the 2025 fires started. On the drive back the night sky glowed red above Topanga Canyon.
I hunkered down for days before returning home to New York City. It all felt like 9/11 to me. The pictures I made then combined life-sized shadowy figures of mythic gods, poems and glyphic words like Afghani for “brotherly love.”
I watched the news and stole its imagery. California was altered forever in a matter of hours. As households and lives were destroyed Dorothy’s ruby slippers, America’s symbol for “home,” were safe inside a museum box.
Large Pastels
Here’s LEE KLEIN’s review from the VILLAGE STAR REVIEW in JUNE 2025
The rolling hills and mountains of Southern California the biosphere the range of climates from desert to snow covered peaks roamed by mountain goats, in one cable car ride the soaring mountains over the sea the vertigo of a place prone to earthquakes, fire, floods, mudslides, a virtual sim city real time life on a movie set, in a movie setting.
What inspired David Hockney, the golden sunshine the movement of topographical features like hyper-suggestive outlines in a Howard Hodgkin painting, this is where the experimental filmmaker and painter Lili White found herself witness to its landscape and its human encroachments during violently transforming wildfires of 2025.
This is hot color this is hot hot hotness the outlines of images like waves spreading over other pictorial terrains, fire in a sizzling blaze along the seams of our imagination.
Working in pastels, White captures the sizzling oozing neon of this place in time: birds and cars move around and through blazes, oil derricks, bridges, flaming flamingo cartoons, a whole range of wildly divergent colors.
Here White is like a canary in coal mine, a canary in a gold mine, in the land of untold riches, ablaze in a vehicular grand slalom coursing through lighting both artificial and natural under circumstances unexpected and previously unknown, which bespeaks the world of Ginza lights in Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID. An endgame for it is just within a hair’s breath of an apocalypse.
