In 2010, Lorena Lohr was on a Greyhound bus in Arizona when she saw the desert for the first time. It was about five in the morning, and she instinctively took a photo from her seat, making what she now considers the first photograph that meant something to her. In the years since, the Canadian-British artist has released a steady stream of publications – Western Nights, Crystal Sands and Blue Springs amongst them – documenting her extended travels around the American Southwest. “It’s important for me to make things into a book, otherwise they don’t feel real,” she explains. While photography is her dominant practice, over the last decade Lorena has also begun to paint, inspired by the scene she witnessed in Arizona. Desert Nudes, the resulting book, was published in 2021, and the series is currently on display at London’s Soho Revue.
“Doing that book really made it okay to show people the paintings,” she notes of the earlier release. “I never thought I would show them to anyone, as it was always quite secret. I made the mistake of telling people I was painting though, and they would ask ‘can I see them?’ and I wouldn’t be ready, so it became kind of an interior obsession.” The new show (open through 30 April), features 23 oil paintings in total, some from the book and others completely new, taking over the entirety of the gallery’s ground floor. “It was quite dreamlike, just being there in a room with them hanging there,” remarks the artist of her first solo painting show. “They really filled the space, it was quite surprising.”
Like her photographs, with which they share a soft palette of washed out pastels, the work was informed by her tours of America, initiated by chance when she was in her late teens and living in New York. “Someone asked if I wanted to ride the Greyhound around with them and it went from there,” recalls Lorena. “It wasn’t intentional, nothing good ever happens when you think about it, but over time I started to see that all these small towns, stranded in the middle of the desert, needed to be recorded properly. So I’ve been trying to do that as much as I can whenever I can.” Viewing New York as “a gateway to a much bigger expanse of the world,” she continued travelling on her own – favouring a since-discontinued month-long bus pass that offered unlimited travel – in an arrangement that shaped the way she worked, and ultimately how she engaged with the places she visited.
“I didn’t know how to paint, I hadn’t studied painting,” continues Lorena, acknowledging her novice start. “I don’t know why it came about really, but when I finished school I started looking at all these old paintings and that really struck a chord. The way an artist rendered the subject matter with equal importance and balance, whether it was joyful or morbid, earthly or from the ‘other’ world of mysticism, alchemy and spirituality – that informed my photographs more than anything, [the idea that] any object would be taken care of and made sacred.” Her photography work is subsequently still life-focused, often depicting vintage car details, kitsch desserts, and quiet corners of interiors that intrigue her. “There were lots of moments when I questioned why I was doing it, the painting,” she adds, “but I think it’s important to have a compulsion to do something. And eventually I got there enough to show people.”
A background idea for several years, it was only in 2014 that Lorena began formulating this body of work, beginning with a drawing on a napkin in a diner: it would take another two years for that initial portrait to be viewer-ready, while a further piece, which she characterises as particularly significant to her study in the medium, was ten years in the making. Everything however, is a product of her wider practice and evolved from ideas collected behind the camera. “Inevitably I’m retaining things when I’m taking pictures; you’re taking the forms in and gathering information at all points in everyday life without knowing it. And it comes out when I sit down [to paint],” she explains. “Many of the paintings are indirectly from experiences I’ve had being out alone; I wouldn’t say they’re autobiographical, there’s a fantastical element to them. As a woman travelling alone you’re out on a limb and viewed with confusion or curiosity, but the girls in the pictures are definitely comfortable with where they are and in harmony with whatever’s going on around them.”
In contrast with her photography work, Lorena’s paintings are populated by these girls, sometimes positioned alone and other times partnered with a twin, propping up a bar or posed against the desert. Depicted nude, topless or in form-fitting tees, their curves often mirror an element of their environment, while their hair and make-up appears stuck in time. “I think it comes from thinking about the illusionistic and universally tempting notion of freedom, there’s a bit of a ‘fuck you’ element to them, because the girls are in this fantasy, just luxuriating in a setting which is traditionally occupied by Western macho archetypes,” offers Lorena of her cast. “I was very interested in paintings of Venus and depictions of saints in landscapes – it naturally just occurred to me that there had to be a form like that in the paintings. A landscape painting of a desert [alone] didn’t seem full enough.”
On the walls of Soho Revue, the paintings’ potential to appear playful is offset by a series of considered frames and silks, the latter adding a relic-like quality to the pieces. “I spend so much time looking at surfaces of different objects, they needed to sit somewhere,” says Lorena. “I didn’t want something super shiny – they have imperfections, which makes them really perfect to me, and the moire silk looks like a ripple or the sand over the desert.” Already planning a second volume, she hopes to continue building on Desert Nudes, expanding the world of her characters and claiming a bigger space for the medium within her own practice. “My photographs are all informed by interactions with people and their stories, but there’s a feeling of being in another state, when you’re looking through a camera and connecting on another level. Painting, however, is very unconscious for me. That feeling of just sitting down anywhere and something appearing in front of you, out of your mind, is unlike anything else.”
Credits
All images courtesy Lorena Lohr