By Robrt Pela | Photos by Angelina Aragon
“I’ve been exploring the idea of absence and what happens when somebody leaves,” artist Lily Regalia says. “I’m trying to show what happens when we get left behind, and applying it to my work.”
Regalia, currently in her second year of Arizona State University’s Master of Fine Arts degree program, grew up in southeastern Wisconsin. “I don’t know if I’ll go back to the Midwest once I graduate,” she confides. “But I do miss fall and spring. We don’t really have seasons here.”
She mostly creates figurative work – paintings and pastel drawings – though she sometimes depicts people and emotions as furniture.
“My mom was a contractor and my whole family is in the building industry, so I grew up with this language of building and construction,” she explains. “I like to apply that language to ideas about growth and deconstruction and reconstruction, and about how we handle emotional trials in our lives.”
Regalia’s workspace at ASU’s Grant Street Studios looks more like installation art than a place to draw chairs as emotion. There, in one corner, a pile of wood chips appears to have been carefully arranged beside a broken ceiling fan and a three-legged chair.
“I’m really drawn to broken things,” she says. “And there’s randomness to where I place things in my studio. But other times I’ll put a soft thing next to a structural thing to see how they play off each other.”
Sometimes, Regalia admits, her studio feels like an empty canvas. “It’s like I use this space to see how much to let an object be broken before I draw it or paint it. I have to see it in the space with other things next to it to see how it interacts, and whether I’ll be able to make art from it.”
Toothbrush
“I use pastels a lot for plein air work, and I have this old toothbrush I use to blend pastels and work them into the paper. I know, it’s weird. But it works great.”
Sawdust and wood chips
“I’ve been messing around with a lot of different browns that I find in wood filler and sawdust. I want to do portraits with them. And I have these wood shims that I’m thinking about sticking under the leg of a broken chair to illustrate how sometimes we pick a quick emotional solution instead of actually fixing anything.”
Palette
“I’ve had this palette forever. I’ve covered both sides. I didn’t like all the black and white on the one side, so I flipped it over. You can see how an artist works by looking at their palette, how they move paint around or make a color choice.”
Spine
“This human vertebra was a gift from the artist Heather Weller. I was doing a study of a human back, and I used this to help me describe the correct angle.”
Insulation
“I’m experimenting with painting on unusual materials, and I like how insulation is kind of pink and fleshy looking, how it resembles the inside of our bodies. You’re not really supposed to touch insulation, so maybe I’ll wear gloves when I work with it.”
