Champagne on Canvas

What I respond to most in other people is when they’ve found a form of expression that feels genuinely theirs—not a genre they’re working in, not a niche they’ve identified and occupied, but something that could only have come from that specific person in that specific life. It doesn’t matter whether it’s photography, painting, writing, or something that doesn’t have a name yet.

Lisa Solberg is a painter based in Los Angeles who works outside anything you’d call a mainstream idiom—loose, personal, with a color sensibility that seems to come from somewhere internal rather than from studying what’s currently fashionable. She has a distinctive presence and, from what I can tell, a vast empty loft used entirely for making things in. I have always been susceptible to large, bare creative spaces with that particular charged atmosphere—the smell of paint and cold coffee and accumulated work. There’s a kind of magic that only exists in rooms like that.

One of her paintings was made partly with champagne. Champagne. I want it badly and I have no idea where I’d put it.