Interview with artist Greg Lahti
Greg Lahti is a Little Rock artist originally from, well from all around the US. His paintings in vivid color and with energetic brush stokes capture the movement and excitement of his subjects often depicted in an enhanced reality. To see more of Greg’s work, check him out at Art Group Gallery in Little Rock and at his website greglahtiart.com.
AAS: Greg, are you an Arkansas native?
GL: No, I was an air force brat and then was moved all around as my dad weaved his way up the corporate ladder. I recently celebrated my birthday and I figured out that I’ve lived and celebrated birthdays in over 10 states. In the late nineties, I escaped from Connecticut with my carpenter belt and a handful of hard luck stories and moved to Arkansas. I loved it immediately and I met some really special people right away. A few of them were from your home state of Louisiana and they taught me how to eat over a picnic table full of crawfish and cook a righteous gumbo. I definitely consider myself an Arkansan now. I’ve lived here long enough to remember Clint Stoerner fumbling the ball against Tennessee, I’ve caught a fish in almost every lake, pond, river or puddle in the area, and I hashtag all my Instagram posts with #arkansasartist lol…
AAS: Have you always painted?
GL: I always drew. Painting and using color came much later. I wanted to be a cartoonist. Which I’m sure was an impressive career choice to my guidance counselors. My parents always accepted that I was a little weird and were probably happy when I finally realized I wasn’t Spider-Man and stopped trying to climb walls with peanut butter on my fingertips. Don Martin (Mad Magazine), Jim Unger (Herman), Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), and Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County), those dudes were my heroes. They could make people laugh using just a few tools and a tiny pool of black ink. How awesome was that?! Eventually, I realized I wasn’t that funny. So, I gave up drawing my comic strip and my bad attitude bunny character and decided I wanted to be a more “serious” artist. It started with Degas. In particular, his drawing of Edmund Duranty at the MET. I saw that and naively thought I could do art like that. It looks just like a cartoon! My love of art and artists keeps growing. I discover artists I want to learn about and learn stuff from all the time. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Sargent and Alphonse Mucha and a whole lot of amazing modern artists who not only create amazing artworks but put out great content to follow as well. Every once in a while I will draw my bunny buddy again and he’s still just as grumpy and gross as ever.
AAS: You have worked in the theater designing and painting sets. How do you think your current art practice was shaped by those experiences?
GL: The first set I ever designed was for a play called Ransom of Red Chief at the old Art Center’s children’s theater. On this large sheet of watercolor paper, I painted what I wanted the cave and the forest to look like. I wanted it to have a playful feel with a really bright color palette. A cross between the book Where the Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss on an acid trip. I had a purple cave and trees with bright red/orange tops with blue trunks. I loved it! The artistic director and the director of the play loved it. Then I had to build a model to scale and blueprints to build from. I had to jump back and forth from being an architect, to a carpenter and then back to an artist. It was a lot of work for really low pay, but I enjoyed it. After all that, nothing intimidates me when I get an idea for a painting or a series of paintings. I’m pretty fearless when I’m standing behind an easel. You ever paint something that looks cool and feels so good you’re scared to make a mark for fear of screwing it up? That ain’t me. “F*ck-it, it’s only paint” is my mantra as I dive back in to try some bone headed idea that just popped into my overcooked noodle of a brain. It would be a disservice to my artistic soul to keep painting where it’s comfortable.
Oh, back to the theater, I also gained an appreciation for storytelling and the atmosphere surrounding the characters I paint. I’m struggling to add even more of that to all my work. I get so focused on getting a nose in the right place I neglect a lot of the surrounding scene. I’d like to get better at designing and creating interesting foregrounds and backgrounds. Right now it’s almost all about the action center stage.
“I consider myself a serious student of art who likes to paint really nutty stuff.”
AAS: I want to ask you first about The Onesie Two-Step. It has a cubism feel to it. Tell me about it.
The Onesie Two-Step, 36” x 24”, oil on canvas
GL: This painting is one of my favorites from the last show. I’ve painted Chelsea a lot. She’s very good at posing and composing herself. I painted a series of her cosplaying Wonder Woman (way before DC and Marvel took over the cinema), as a ballerina in a blue tutu, as a ballerina wielding swords and knives, and several more stilted, traditional poses with and without her cats. When I saw a pic of her dressed in an oversized Pikachu onesie acting all loose and silly I begged her to send me more shots I could use to paint from. Something about a serious goth girl cutting loose wearing all that happy, floofy yellow was a killer contrast and fits my style and art personality perfectly. I consider myself a serious student of art who likes to paint really nutty stuff.
The cubism look you mentioned is an important part to my painting Zen. I like contrast and balance. If there are a lot of curves and waves of colors and paint strokes, I subconsciously start balancing that with hard edges and architectural lines. I go back and forth the whole time I’m working… bright colors then dull colors, hard lines back to soft blending, sloppy strokes to tightly rendered ones …ohm.
AAS: As someone who grew up in Louisiana and lived in five years in New Orleans, I was immediately drawn to your paintings of the New Orleans jazz scene. I really love Royale Street Duet. Here again I love what you did with the background.
Royal Street Duet, 16” x 12”, oil on canvas
GL: I’m jealous. New Orleans is a magical place for me. Beyond the French Quarter and obvious tourist attractions, there are so many areas with their own unique personalities. I love the traditional jazz music many stay loyal to, but you can also find plenty of new flavors of jazz and other genres. There’s a culture and energy I love and appreciate. It never fails to inspire and get my creative juices flowing. Everything I see there feels like it could be the next Lahti painting. I’ve painted several paintings from inside my favorite spots and, like this painting, people jamming out on the street corner. I almost exclusively paint figures, but New Orleans has inspired me to paint its courtyards, balconies and buildings too. I have several great pics I took earlier this year I can’t wait to paint!
AAS: And then there is Juke Joint Blues. In that one your control of color really conveys the atmosphere and look of so many of the jazz joints there. Congratulations on that one.
Juke Joint Blues, 36’ x 24”, oil on canvas
GL: Before I finally sold this one. I pimped it around and won several awards and prizes with it. I’m still very proud of how this one turned out. I put a lot of work into it, especially when it came to the composition. I wanted to convey the cramped stage they performed on, without it feeling too busy or uncomfortable. Vince the harmonica player is the main dude and leader of the band, but in my painting he's just a small part of the bigger story. I wanted the viewer to feel the sweaty, soul-wrenching blues they were jamming and appreciate the venue it was being played in. There can be a lot of heart and energy in a tiny little club, and I’ve always preferred that to big venue performances. The right music note bent until it’s singing in your bones is way more electric than all the smoke, lasers, and fireworks.
AAS: Greg, you are known for your portraits of beautiful women, painted in different settings and in different styles. Tell me about that and about Jazz Licks.
Jazz Licks, 24” x 18”, charcoal and acrylic on canvas
GL: Yes, despite the variety of things I’ve painted I’m definitely known for that, and I embrace it now. Since I’ve been at the Art Group Gallery, I did a series of San Francisco paintings (the wharf, boats, streetcars, sea lions etc.), last year I had a series of Little Rock paintings at Community Bakery, and all the NOLA scenery and jazz and blues musicians I paint, but I am definitely known for painting beautiful women. It’s by far my favorite thing to paint and collect. When I visit a museum, I enjoy most of the different styles and subjects, but I’m always drawn towards figure paintings. I’ll study them like I’ll be tested on it later. Most of the people I follow online are figure painters and most of my favorite artists from the past painted people.
Jazz Licks was part of a whole series of similar works where I used charcoal over an underpainting in acrylic. The backgrounds were all freestyle mark making, dancing around to some rippin’ music, which I would refine later. It was the first series I ever did that exclusively featured beautiful women. I didn’t try to mix in other subjects. Although NOLA musicians painted/drawn in this style would be dope! No?
AAS: Much of your work is set in what you describe as the space between reality and dreams. And you’ve done several of Marilyn Monroe in that space. The one of her eating a crawfish is my favorite, of course. Tell be about that one.
Dreaming of a Crawfish Boil, 24” x 24”, oil on canvas
GL: How I started making portraits of Marilyn Monroe is interesting. I guess I’m guilty of being drawn to fame and celebrity as much as anyone else. Marilyn was a huge celebrity in her time (and all the times after that). Sure, she’s plenty cute, but I wanted to understand why there has been such a lasting fascination. So, I watched her movies, and read some killer biographies, and started collecting pics I liked of her in a separate folder. I became obsessed with the obsession of her and then became obsessed with her myself. There are soooo many great pics of her that I’ve used as reference, and like all the other models I like to paint, I try to do an honest portrait, but work them into the fantasy dream world in my head.
I make at least one painting of Marilyn a year and a stupid number of cartoons and drawings. This painting of her trying to be delicate at a crawfish boil cracks me up! The expression on her face looks like the pepper and spice from her last mudbug just kicked in. And who wouldn’t want to be at a crawfish boil next to Marilyn? …and this isn’t even the weirdest painting I’ve done of her. There’s one I did with her stranded on a desolate, alien world wearing a spacesuit and holding a sick looking rifle, surrounded by her group of alien friends.
Speaking of Marilyn, a customer came into the gallery today and hated my latest Marilyn painting. She loved the face I painted, but the pose was way too seductive for her. If she only knew the life my Marilyn characters lead in my dream world.
AAS: But you also do more toned-down atmospheric paintings like Maiden and Meter. I love the composition and the graphic elements, which are often a feature of your work.
Maiden and Meter, 24” x 12”, oil on canvas
GL: It probably has a lot to do with the people I know and the places I go, but I don’t see a lot of people wearing bright colored dresses. They sure are fun to paint though. I’m pretty sure I stole this pic from the internet, but I liked the idea of her walking around some polluted city in her summer dress and it created a perfect opportunity to find and paint that balance of contrasts I mentioned. She’s bright and glowing with warmth, flowing and slightly windswept. So, I balanced that with hard lines of a closed business in muted grays. I keep trying to paint better shadows adding lots of color and interesting things in them. Unfortunately, that’s the stuff that never shows up in a little pic online, and why I’m always pleading for people to go see art in person. You can miss so much flicking a finger through your feed. Although, how disappointing is it to see something in person and it looks worse than the online version? Y’all must’ve doctored the hell outta this one before you posted it!
AAS: I also really enjoy your slice of life paintings like A Pitcher Is Worth A Thousand Words. The whole composition and the way you handled the background work so well.
A Pitcher is Worth a Thousand Words, 24” x 20”, oil on canvas
GL: Thanks, that’s my buddy Sean! Well, it’s his hand resting on the countertop. Haha. This one’s very nostalgic and if you live in Little Rock you know exactly where this is. I took this right before they locked the city down during the first confusing weeks of the pandemic and painted it at home in my studio praying that we could all get back out and drink beer together someday soon. The hardest part of this piece was the background. I wanted enough details to give clues to the location but wanted all the focus to stay with the hard-working multitasker. I kept lessening the contrast and scrubbing out details, then adding some back in. Eventually, I found the right balance and pieces to fit this puzzle.
AAS: I know you are a very active partner at Art Group Gallery in Little Rock. Not all artists feel comfortable around potential competitors, but you seem to enjoy the comradery of other artists.
GL: My biggest competition is always with myself. I always think I can use what I learned to paint it better next time. It’s part of what keeps me going so voraciously. Working and being part of the AAG is also fuel for inspiration. There are so many unique and dedicated artists constantly filling our walls with their latest and greatest. Being surrounded by all that wonderful art and seeing how happy it makes our visitors is so encouraging. When I leave the gallery, I can’t wait to get into the studio to create something new to show off.
