What Are You Working On Now? Lolita Develay

*Rococo's Basilisk Featuring Baby Champurrado*, Oil on Canvas, 2018

What are you working on now? is a Couch in the Desert series where we ask artists what they are making and thinking about in and outside the studio.

Lolita Develay

I am working on Paintings, self-care, creating content for my YouTube channel, thinking about what I want to do to update my website. Writing a proposal for a grant.

I’ve been busy, busy since forever. I’ve managed to make that busy more purposeful. Finding balance with meditation, yoga, and qigong are part of my daily practice that allows me to retain a healthy mind-body connection. It’s what helps clear my mind for creative work. Staying in touch with family and friends, and eating healthful food are critical components of my lifestyle. Obtaining my MFA was part of that pursuit. Before obtaining my MFA I was busy with creative pursuits, but it was nowhere as satisfying as creating and teaching Art full-time. I am always looking for fresh approaches to teaching Art, fine-tuning and refreshing assignments. That has expanded to creating demo videos for the online classes that I teach, keeping me in touch with my video editing and filmmaking background.

The Art keeping me busy recently involved portraiture, my American Woman series. Two of the paintings, Rococo’s Basilisk featuring Baby Champurrado and Qcelleration, were acquired by The Cosmopolitan last year. That entire process was wonderful, from first contact to installation. I also did an Artist’s talk with them. American Woman is a project exploring the intersection of the changing landscape of racial identity in America and female self-acceptance. It questions what it means to be visible in today’s world with images originating on social media.

I have also focused on a more traditional project of Portraits with a commission from the City of Las Vegas. That was an interesting project in many ways. It is interesting to find my vision in references selected by others rather than having complete autonomy the way I normally do. The scale of 8” x 10” that was required is much smaller than I have worked with historically. My attraction to painting is the investigation of creating an image with a rich surface quality that is really actually quite thin. The constant learning pulls me in.

African American Heritage Exhibition 2024: A COLLECTION OF THE INSPIRATIONAL BLACK EXPERIENCE, Chamber Gallery.

I tend to work on more than just one project at any given time. I will continue with my American Woman series, going back in to create new passages to address details that I will complete the paintings. I will be creating a bit more content for my YouTube channel because I love to offer demos of my Drawing and Design exercises to my online and in-person students. I started the channel for my online classes and found that the demo videos are very helpful for my in-person students also.

Watercolor is now calling my name, asking me to make paintings with it again. I’ve done all of my major works with Oils recently. I’ve dabbled with watercolor as demos for my students. They whet my appetite, but now it’s time to eat a full meal, now it’s time to paint some watercolors. In moving to watercolors, I will also change the subject matter to flowers. Not just any flowers, but from among the images of flowers I have captured in the High Limit rooms of my favorite Hotel-Casion on the strip.

With new projects and finishing those I am immersed in now, I continue to observe life so that it finds its way into the voice of my paintings.

Lolita Develay received her MFA in Painting from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2014. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and born in Pearblossom, California she is a painter and artist whose chromatic paintings are integrated with statements on access and social values. Develay's oeuvre embodies a dynamic blend of geographical influences, cultural intersections, and social consciousness. With themes of beauty, sexuality, race, and spirituality, Develay's work serves as a mirror to the complex state of American life.

See more of Lolita’s work on her website and on Instagram.

Images courtesy of the artist.

Posted and published by Lyssa Park on April 7, 2024