Lauz Bechelli

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: Lauz, I am glad that we had the opportunity to coincide in Austin, Texas. When we met you were directing the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas. What brought you from California to the Lone Star State and what are some of the adjustments that this relocation entailed for you personally and creatively?

Lauz Bechelli: Thank you so much for the invitation to dialogue, Nicolás. I hope that this conversation can meander similarly to our in-person ones in Austin. You have always had a way of finding the intersection of our interests and an eye for authenticity.

Austin is pretty close in spirit to where I am from originally, especially compared to the rest of Texas, so the move wasn’t too shocking from that point of view. It wasn’t a straight line from California to Austin, though. After graduating from UC Davis in 2010, I traveled and worked as an illustrator across Europe, Central America, and the UK for seven years, bouncing around in Istanbul, Milan, Granada, Nicaragua, and Aberdeen. I eventually missed a stable community and so spent a very grey fall/winter/spring in Ballater, Scotland working on graduate applications and was luckily accepted to UT Austin. That time travelling was very important to me both personally and as an artist. I think I continue to chase the unpredictability and instability of that period, but I try to confine it to my art practice these days... mostly.

Looking at your question from that context, as the Texas move being a return to the US, that was a bit of a shock. My first grocery trip was startling simply because of the grandness of the space and the glut of food options. It was strange to feel askew in such a common place. I hadn’t realized that my mental construct of onions had been slowly shrinking, but it had.

This same relativity had happened creatively – my sense of normal, and of good, had shifted. It was freeing when I realized this, but it took me years to see it. As an educator, I push students to travel because I don’t think there is a substitute for the transformations it can cause. The more I traveled the less I had a sense of what was right, and that made my life better.

You can become a bit of an alien though, it’s a great way to disintegrate yourself. No one knows you, so no one knows how you used to be. You can just reinvent yourself over and over and that is a unique sort of escapism.

NDEREOM: I see that you worked as an Interim Director at Women & Their Work, a place whose legacy I greatly admire. Who were some of the creatives that you came in contact with while at this space, and why do you think that organizations like this might still have a relevant role to play in the years to come?

 LB: That experience at Women & Their Work (WATW) was a formative one for me. I was lucky to land at a place with such a record of long-sighted curation right after graduate school. Working with Executive Director Chris Cowden and Program Director Diane Sikes, and curators like Annette Carlozzi, and Vicki Meek, taught me what it looks like to really support artists. That has been incredibly important in understanding my own rights and in arguing for others as an art administrator. WATW supports their artists monetarily, offers curatorial support, installation support, and guidance/feedback at all stages of the process. They go to great lengths to understand and realize their artists’ visions. That support is important, especially for emerging female and non-binary artists. Having a group of people believe in your ability to be decisive and visionary can be emotionally groundbreaking. Being surrounded by powerful women can also be emotionally groundbreaking.

I learned so much being there about the importance of professionalism as an artist too. Artists can be persnickety, and have the right to be, but being organized, on time (ish), and a decent communicator goes a long way to easing the workload, and stress load, for everyone. Working with Jade Walker, and Rehab El Sadek, both phenomenal people and successful creatives, showed me the power of kindness and collaboration in that setting. I think women have had to undergo several evolutions in the workplace to advance themselves, including mimicking men’s behavior. I hope that gentleness can find its way back. Or rather, maybe that gentleness can find its way into the workplace for the first time. That is the type of progress I am interested in and working with those women has given me a model for that.

It is not a good political moment for progressives (yesterday reproductiverights.gov went dark, women are being refused basic medical care (click here), transgender rights are being erased from the conversation (click here), Alaska is being lustfully undressed (click here), but places like WATW hold memory. Their archives, spanning 42 years, were recently acquired by the Smithsonian. Preserving the history of progress is so important as we watch radical changes reshape our country.

Justin Gregg coined the term ‘prognostic myopia’ to describe human’s inability to make beneficial long-term decisions, and I fear convenience and immediacy are causes of many of our worst. Making art isn’t convenient or quick or efficient. Women & Their Work, and places like it, are not convenient. These activities and places expand our communities and minds; they fill our time and offer opportunities to think more, to work (the good kind) more. Women & Their Work holds a sacred intellectual and creative space for women and for the non-binary. It is a safe, physical space to meet in person, a space that, at its healthiest, encourages disagreements and engagement. An organization run by a small team can develop creatively and autonomously in a way that larger, entrenched ones, can’t.

They are, of course, not immune to what happens in homogenous communities, but their goal is to recognize and address disparities in diversity. If we realize the importance of heterogeneity in the health of a system, then we can see how important safeguarding that pursuit is.

So, for those reasons, and more, I think this organization remains incredibly relevant today. I wish it was less relevant!

NDEREOM: Women have been central to so much of who I am and what I do. Women have been the mentors that men have not been for me and I hear you clearly. This is one of the reasons why My heart goes to supporting BIG time the work that women identified people are doing. No offense men, and women have been here for me when I most needed support of all kind.

You are making me nostalgic about my time in Texas and how I lived just a few blocks from Women & their Work, and I could stop by this place any time that I was walking around East Austin. Moving to your own work, you deploy found objects in your creative practice. Can you talk about where this impetus comes from, and how this might speak to or go beyond the assemblage?

LB: I, like you, have a dedicated walking practice. To quote Rebecca Solnit, “I like walking because it is slow…’. I am suspicious of speed, especially in decision making. As I get older, I want to luxuriate in things more, I don’t want to go for a quick walk, I don’t want to take a quick shower, I don’t want to run to the grocery store. Some things refuse to be fast: reading, listening to music, cooking. They are small refusals but their quality changes if you speed them up. In the lunchroom last year, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, then a curator and PhD candidate at UT Austin, said offhandedly, “Rest is resistance” and I have never been able to forget it. * see The Nap Ministry.

These slow walks are where I find most of my objects. I find benches, frames, paint, all sorts of clothes, etc. I like to think of it as an opportunity to encounter fate and an exercise in gratitude. They are little gifts that open new avenues.

I also ‘find’ objects by thinking about excess. I gather a lot of packing materials. Recently, I’ve been working with Soup Peddler to use their leftover bones from bone broth and gathering burnt wood from the fires in Bastrop. Paint has historically been tied to available natural resources, Lapis Lazuli from Afghanistan, raw Sienna from Italy, cochineal from South America, burnt bones from everywhere. There was value and meaning in these actual materials, and with how hard they were to come by, but now the surface has become the essential force. The color of something is more important than what it is or where it is from. Artists are starting from what they want rather than what they have. It is like letting your leftovers rot in the fridge while you go out to eat. I think it is worthwhile to revisit the old way of working.

The ‘assemblage’ of my work is mostly hidden. Placing objects underneath creates complicated surfaces to play painting games on. Most of the games I want to play are available with things I find, colors I find, surfaces I find. I just have to be flexible in my thinking and let go of being particularly willful. Sometimes, I do just make a painting without worrying about all this.

NDEREOM: How do you deal energetically with the objects that you interact with within your creative practice and which eventually make it into your paintings? Are there any spiritual traditions/rituals/practices that may help you mediate with these previously owned items and what they might be permeated with?

LB: I wonder about an object’s ability to be permeated with something. I would rather frame complicated objects as ones who need a new chance to be useful, even (or maybe especially) those things that are tainted or condemned. I approach objects with a very open heart and open senses and my relationship with each one is quite personal.

I would like to answer around the rest of the question. The work of many of spiritual people, or energetic people, happens in solitude. You develop that sense internally, usually in a remote place, with no record of any of it. I have always enjoyed readings that engage with objects obliquely and with superstition. Juana does this in Steinbeck’s The Pearl, the Buendía family struggles with it in Cien años de Soledad.

In graduate school, I really opened my process to someone in a studio visit. Thankfully, he was a friend and a discrete person and suggested it might save me some hassle if I were more guarded. This was great advice, and I am grateful to have developed a sense of secrecy within myself. A lot of energetic dissipation can happen in conversation without care, and it can affect your daring. I find things get especially rotten when the goal of self-advertisement or promotion is primary. Our cultural moment is very toxic in this regard, and so I am inclined to keep my rituals and practices mostly to myself.

Unless of course, I am sharing a vegan ice-cream sandwich with someone who meets me with openness, and then it is a lucky conversation.

NDEREOM: That reminds me of our vegan ice cream sandwich meetings at Gati! I guess we will have to go back there so that I can hear the rest of your response and I respect your secrecy. What is your own relationship with objects in the everyday? Have you come across a found object with which you have found an energetic affinity?

LB: I am actually not a big object person. I have moved so much in my life that objects feel a lot like obligations. I can be quite utilitarian with the things I do own, there is a lot of tilting and falling apart. I guess I am more interested in, again, making use of the things I find. My art-making isn’t very separate from my life-making in that way. Things come into my life and then they leave and I don’t have to carry them around. What I love is space and I’m always trying to create or manipulate space.

That being said, my relationship to objects as beings and beings as objects is more nuanced. There was a dog that I really loved, Lucy, and when she died, we buried her up on the family hill behind the house. Over time, I understood that all her parts were being pulled into the soil and into roots, being eaten, picked up by branches, climbing to the top of the canopy and falling back to the earth. That helped me. This is an obvious and daily meditation for most of the rest of the world, but coming from my cultural bubble, I needed that physical experience to change my understanding of objects. Lucy has definitely expanded into Austin by now. 

I feel I owe everything to the material around me and to my body, even when we discuss consciousness and souls. I have an emotional reaction to things left on streets and objects abused without thought. You could argue that I ‘abuse’ a lot of objects, with all the disassembling and bondage and ripping, but I don’t treat them like trash.

I am interested in not only what I find on street corners but also what I find in my waking mind – thinking of everything, thoughts/memories/feelings, as material and trying to do a mental scavenge as well. That way the mystery is acknowledged and preserved, and I don’t spend my time trying to convince anyone of anything. Listening and perception is the priority.

NDEREOM: I wish I could inhabit that relationship with objects. My home is literally an archive. I think is is the Catholic in me and my upbringing with relics and the like. But back to you your work, what is a painting for you or how would you explain painting to a person who might not be familiar with this medium? I am thinking how the concept of making something to go on a wall, that can then be easily traded and transported, is relatively new. Before all of this, there were petroglyphs, for example. Also, in your case, what would be a painting is complicated… but I rather have you talk about it.

LB: It is complicated. And it can also be contradictory. I am dedicated to used and found materials and generally not buying things, but I still buy new paint sometimes. My dogma only goes so far. I love to play with color and to lay it down on a fresh and taught white canvas. It is ecstatic for me. Right now, on the backside of a show, I just want to play with color.

I do take your point about petroglyphs. We lost a sense of painting’s purpose in community when it turned into something tradable. It was useful in a much more obvious way, like a street sign. Its use now is very different for different actors. I was on reddit recently and read ‘expensive paintings are just trading cards for the rich’ and find that rings true to the sourest part of me, but I would be sorry to allow it to extinguish the sincerest parts.

I want to make some generalizations to try and work through this idea so bear with me:

The painter most often doesn’t experience painting as creating a commodity. Painters are usually poor and obsessed with something. So, there is already this divide between the painting as an object and the painter themselves. It gets more complicated as you add in the viewer and the buyer. I think everyone wants some of the magic artists are after, but the problem is you can’t buy that magic, it is immune to purchase. Though, I wonder if art historians achieve some version in research and discovery, like collectors achieve it through accumulation and social ascension. We all access pleasure and purpose differently.

Paintings are a weird commodity, because market independence is such a crucial ingredient. Popular demand is usually the driving force behind invention. That is why there is this terrible loop of dissonance that you will talk about in the future – to like painting and be repulsed by it - artists rely on and reject commercialization at varying degrees of obviousness. Painters seem closest to that money because their work is easiest to commodify, making their repression closest to the surface and so perhaps the most upsetting to everyone involved. Painters expose all our lack of purity, which is supposed be a defining characteristic of our profession.

Looking at it another way: the public expects artists to teach them or show them something inaccessible to the everyday person, to serve as the ‘visionary other’ for the rest of society. I studied Jainism for a while and there is a parallel there: Jainism describes two paths to enlightenment – one for householders, who work and support society, and one for mendicants who renounce worldly life in pursuit of spiritual purity. The mendicant can’t exist without the householder because they provide shelter and food and do all the unsavory, business activities the ascetic needs to avoid. The ascetic, in turn, offers the householder spiritual advice and guidance, and in my opinion – a form of absolution for their business, a way of saying ‘I am doing my part by supporting the righteous and the beautiful.’

I think we are doing something similar with artists, society expects a version of purity and guidance from them. In this way, artists are serving the emotional needs of the public. We just repress the dissonant aspect of payment.

But to answer the first part of your question, what a painting is and how would I describe it to someone who doesn’t know the medium, I think I would just say it is a liquid or paste applied to a surface to visually communicate. That description is simpler and probably better.

NDEREOM: I am sitting with your compelling responses and thinking about my own radicalization in the arts. What is the conversation that painting–or the act of painting–might have with your soma; your body? It is easier to see the external manifestation of an art form, but how would you say this is internalized by you, or within you?

LB: For me, painting puts you in contact with the mechanics of nature and of vision, our dominant sense and primary way of interacting with the world. It teaches you about many thing’s tendencies: fluids, atmosphere, color, your own hands. Taking enough drawing classes is a bit like taking psychedelics. It isn’t a very practical thing to look at the world around you like you were going to draw it, but with enough practice you can sort of turn that ‘sight’ on. You can collapse space into a flat plane limited by the confines of your eyes. It isn’t a big jump to go from seeing the world around you in this manipulatable way to seeing yourself like that too. Manipulable and circumstantial.

Photography has done something unnatural to our reading of the picture plane. We often think sight works like a photo, that we can see the whole image, but that’s far from the truth. Your attention is the most fundamental part of what and how you see, and then what you remember too. Painting plays with precisely this, with what is given attention, because there is the potential for complete invention. It can feel debilitating when you recognize how many variables there are.

Personally, it also really affects the way I see. If I am in the studio for more than 3 or 4 hours, my eyes act differently when I leave. I have a sense of vertigo, collapsed space, and color hypersensitivity that is very real and the more I paint the weirder my sight gets.

I am sure other artists feel some version of this as well, dancers and performers, but I can’t speak to their somatic experience.

NDEREOM: I agree with you about the inner transformation that can take place when doing something for a long period of time. I experienced this while dancing in Brazil, for 5 days, for hours and hours at a time.

As a person who very rarely makes objects, I have a somewhat fraught relationship with painting as the artform that feeds the art industry machinery and that keeps art capitalist, for the most part. But the thing is that I also enjoy painting very much. I don’t have a question, but would rather hear you talk about this medium as it pertains to life as opposed to commerce.

LB: Oh absolutely – such a riddle. I got sucked into this a few questions ago. Painting can be such a simple pleasure, but we have to accept its beautiful parts alongside its ugly parts, or we can get bitter. A thing or action can be beautifully pure, and it is our nature to want to own and accumulate that feeling or object, and that desire (followed by action) contaminates it. Around and around.

I deeply feel that fraught relationship you are talking about, but the world’s desire to commodify seems to be unwaveringly present. Maybe we can utilize it instead of allowing it to dampen our spirits.

I am tired of filling my studio, my storage, and my friends and parents houses with virgin objects from the money machine. I don’t want to fund the destruction of our natural resources. I don’t want to see millionaires flourish. I want to be out of that game, but in a way that still gives me a sense of joy and freedom, not of stinginess. Efficiency and frugality can exist inside of frivolity and generosity, and actually these are considerations central to my work. Where is the excess? And how can we find freedom from scarcity and a ‘holiday state of mind’ (as Agnes Martin puts it) in this excess? How does one free themselves from desire by recognizing the abundance of the actual?

Ultimately, the goal is to find a way to achieve that same ecstatic moment I spoke of earlier with materials outside of the revenue stream. Used packing materials, used clothes, boxes and scraps and material that takes almost no processing or shipping. Can the commodifying machine eat itself?

NDEREOM: At the moment of this conversation you have an exhibition in Dallas. Can you expand on this and maybe discuss about painting as it deals with generating a patining in one place and then installing it in another; or painting with a place in mind?

LB: Your question gets to an important point about when a painting begins and when it ends. Recently, I have been more interested in developing space for paintings to happen than in executing vision. You can see this in Sunchaser, my current show at Liliana Bloch gallery in Dallas.

Painting used to be more extractive for me. I would keep my eyes in capture mode so I could arrest and recreate something essential. Something about that way of working was always troubling, (the capture? the possession?), especially as an outdoor person. It has the flavor of imperialism. American landscape and German Romanticism especially try to recreate the grandness of the outdoors for at-home use, constructing a sense of expedition and wonder inside of comfort. They still do stop me at museums, though; I can get lost in Bierstadt and Durand. I may be mesmerized by something else there; to do with gluttony and attachment to effort.

Anyways, I found I didn’t like the way I was present in my daily life when I was making paintings in this way. It was like being awake wasn’t enough;I had to be awake with an ulterior motive. There is something so American about finding a way to constantly capitalize experiences. Someone told me there is no amount you can give to art making that will be enough; it will always demand more, and you have to set up some boundaries. It’s good to stop sometimes too, not identify too much with being the artist.

I have shifted to a much more improvisational practice where I can turn ‘seek’ mode off. I am trying to trust that experiences are being stored somewhere instead of trying to possess everything. So far, it is working. I sit down and open and some compost of my experiences and explorations comes out. My most recent work, Cedar Fire, Bones, and At Home, all came out this way. It is all sitting in the soup of my belly, and then blam, it’s out (usually in small drawing form)… and better than if I wrought it from my mind. As a naturally anxious and controlling person, it has been an effort to learn how to loosen my grip this way, but also healing.

This brings me to your question about generating a painting in one place and then installing it in another, which is similar to starting your painting in one place and then finishing it in another – a different way of turning ‘seek’ mode off. Things still catch my eye when I’m not looking, and I still enjoy replication: the mechanics of light and edge, playing with someone else’s dramas, flipping between copying and disintegrating. Sometimes, I make one piece based on a sketch and it is finished in 10 minutes, and then I make another piece based on that same sketch and it takes 2 years. I don’t understand it.

I don’t know that there is a big difference between beginning with an external reference and beginning internally. The things that show up ‘internally’ are still derivative, they have just been digested a bit more. I am in the middle of exploring that difference right now.

NDEREOM: I am so grateful, Lauz, for this conversation. I rarely engage in dialogue with people who paint. Most of my art family revolves around performance art and the like. I hope to see you later this year so we can go out for vegan ice cream sandwiches and walk through Austin admiring local plants.

LB: Yes, please. Come soon.

All images courtesy of Lauz Bechelli / For specific credits hover over the image.

Lauz Bechelli’s links: Website / Instagram

Lauz Bechelli received her BA in studio art from the University of California, Davis, and her MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, where she currently teaches painting and drawing. Bechelli is a 2021 recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellowship Award in Vadodara, India where she collaborated with the Department of Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit at the Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda and Carbon Craft of Hubli. She attended the Penland School of Craft residency, Chautauqua residency, and the Priyasri residency in Vadodara, India and has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad.