Featured Artist: Lilly Lyddon

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Q: Can you tell me about your wood art project?

A: It’s inspired by an artist I met at the Plaza Art Fair named Janelle Lile. She is from Washington I think. Basically what she does is she incorporates a lot of different stuff and has kind of basic drawings of people that are a little more general and a lot of geometric elements to it. I really liked the simplistic look of it but she also incorporates stuff from her grandparents– she has reading notes that she transfers onto fabric from her grandmother and she has train engineer manual diagrams. I’m kind of working on a second version of that as a series. I have some diagrams from textbooks from my grandfather from the 1920s so they were printed before the great depression. I’m transferring those onto some pieces of wood. They are very layered because she has a very layered look. I think for me it is adding a real geometric ideas to it and I like the balance between the wood which is very natural looking with the harsh lines of the geometry where the juxtaposition is really nice.

Q: Have you always been an artist?

A: I lived near the Nelson Atkins Museum in an apartment complex basically across the street. We used to go there all the time and we would do our classes there.  We had a really good art program at my old school, St. Paul’s, so I guess it was always around art but I started drawing second half of 7th grade.

Q: Have you done any other art besides drawing and your wood project?

A: The wood project was actually the first project I have ever done that wasn’t a flat paper drawing so that was definitely something new. I thought for my first different kind of project it looked pretty good.

Q: What kind of things do you like drawing?

A: I taught myself to draw– I’ve never taken a drawing class. I kind of started by copying other people’s drawings and I was really interested in drawing eyes. I would copy cartoons of eyes and pretty soon they would expand until I started doing a lot of portraits. I really like doing portraits.

Q: Are you in drawing at East?

A: I am now, this is my first year I’ve taken an art class that wasn’t like intro or required by the school.

Q: Do you think you are a little more advanced than everyone else?

A: I think drawing 2 would have been fine for me, but I like drawing one. It has astructure and it gives me time to just draw. I didn’t know where I stood because I was self-taught I was like ‘I have no idea what I’m doing I’m just putting graphite on paper’ so it was cool to see where I stood and seeing what I can and cannot do.

Q: Do you plan on taking Drawing two?

A: I’m not sure because I am in IB I have a really tight schedule. I have IB art to draw and do my projects and that is what the wood project is for. I haven’t quite decided if I am going to have time for that.

Q: Is all your art through that IB class?

A: Right now, yes.