The other morning, I thumbed open my Instagram to try to temporarily drown out all the fucking existence that was happening around me, and I saw the phenomenal image embedded above. It’s by Liz Lent, a social media mutual of mine, with whom I’ve only shared a few friendly exchanges. On a whim, I decided to glissade into her DMs and ask if she’d let me post some of her art on here WU, along with maybe a short Q&A if she had the time. She said yes, because she’s a nice person and my glissade game is very strong.
The Q&A sorta drifted into a lovely conversation about why we make art, where it comes from, and how much control we have over how it comes out. I had a great time, and I feel like a made a new friend. So, with Liz’s permission, I’m just going to post the whole back-and-forth here (minus all the stuff that would make me sound stupid).
Thanks for reading Weird Universe! Subscribe for free to receive new posts whenever I get around to sending them.
DDC: First question: How do we even know each other? Do you have any idea? I can't remember when I started following you. (I do know I followed you first.) Was it through [our mutual friend] Stephen Levinson and [the podcast he created and produces] The Novelizers with Andy Richter?
LL: I love your first question because I was asking myself that today. It has to be through Stephen and The Novelizers. I've known Stephen since college—we were part of the humor magazine at the University of Michigan.
DDC: Well then, it's definitely that. I think there's some context if you go up higher in this chat. There's a link to your painting of a door, in which I tell you I don't know why I like it, but I like it, which artists must just love to hear. I'm not at all shocked that you're a humorist, by trade or by hobby. There's a strong humor that bubbles up from your images, even when they're not overtly funny (which a lot of them are). What do you do when you're not painting or drawing?
LL: I'm so glad you like that door. I was really happy with how it turned out but no one else seemed to really like it. To hell with them! Anyway, by day I'm in the not very funny field of health care fundraising. I'm a writer and handle donor communications for a large health care foundation in Michigan. I've learned just enough about health care and everything that can go wrong with a human to be constantly afraid. Bad career path for a hypochondriac for sure.
DDC: I gather that you're relatively new to art. That's not a critique. You describe yourself in your bio as an "Anxiety-riddled, middle-aged woman trying to learn how to draw, paint, breathe deeply and swear less." I can relate to that completely, except for the part about the swearing. Do you think (or overtly know) that teaching yourself fine art is a means for dealing with the hypochondria and anxiety? (I picked up the guitar and piano again after twelve years during the pandemic.)
LL: That's fantastic! I wish I could play an instrument. Has it been helpful for you, aside from just enjoying it? Learning to paint and draw for me was 100 percent in response to anxiety. I developed a panic disorder about six or seven years ago, and it made me miserable for a long time. I had a great therapist, and she worked miracles for me, but it's one of those things that you kind of have to manage each day. I read a biography of Churchill and how he used painting to cope with his depression. I figured if painting could help him get through something like World War II, then it would probably help me get through my own issues. So, I bought a set of watercolors and sketchbook and just started painting every day. I found that I really, really loved it, and it allowed me to quiet my brain enormously. I practiced for a year without sharing it with anyone except my family, and then I started my Instagram in October 2022 in order to participate in Inktober.
DDC: I'm so glad you did. Your posts brighten up my timeline immeasurably and have helped inspire me to purposefully follow more artists and bring my algorithm back from the brink. So, thank you! Playing absolutely does help me. I consider it a form of meditation—I've since learned to meditate as well, but that's a different thing—and for a while I was even traveling with my ukulele because I needed to be able to play something to soothe myself. If you've taught yourself to paint and draw this well, I'm certain you could learn an instrument as well. And you might one day. We're always surprising ourselves.
LL: I'm so glad about your timeline. There are so many amazing artists on here and seeing their work every day really does boost my happiness levels. This is the extent of my social media these days—art and cute animals—and I think I've hit the sweet spot. Thanks for the encouraging words on music too. I've always secretly wanted to learn the cello. Maybe I will give it a try.
DDC: Did you begin with any artistic experience? Were you ever even a doodler? How much have you improved since you first started?
LL: I did have a bit of artistic experience in the sense that I come from a family of artists. My parents met at art school, my grandfather was a commercial artist, my great grandfather was a photographer, and I was the black sheep of the family because I wanted to be a writer. So, I drew a lot as a kid but gave it up once I went to college and never really picked it up again until I started this adventure. I'm terrible with perspective and straight lines and all these things that I'm pretty sure are important, but I seem to be able to get fairly close to what I'm aiming for. I'm disappointed a lot though because I don't have the skills yet to really put down on paper what I see in my head. But I draw or paint every day to try and get better, and I do think I'm seeing improvements. Even if everything is lousy, though, I feel like I'm still going to do it because I just enjoy it so much. It's so much easier than writing.
DDC: That's fascinating. That's why I went back to music. The world was falling apart, and I needed something, and I didn't have time to deal with my chronic writer's block. Plus, I was already bad at music, so I didn't have to feel bad about being bad at it. It was baked in. I gotta say, your “Rush Hour” has some impressive perspective. It's got a sort of comic book quality to it.
LL: I hear you on that chronic writer's block. It's brutal. It's so good to have that secondary outlet. Thanks for saying that about “Rush Hour.” It took me a long time to figure out how to do that perspective. It's still not exactly what I wanted. I'm going to try it again on a large canvas because I'd kind of like the squirrel to be right in the viewer's eyeline.
DDC: What artists or pieces of art inspire your work, if any?
LL: I love Edward Hopper for his big swathes of color and sad people. Everything is flat but still vibrant in a muted way, if that makes any sense. I love Edward Gorey, obviously. I also think Maira Kalman is amazing. I dream of being able to paint like her—she uses gouache, too, which is my favorite medium.
And oddly enough, I'm also going to say Buster Keaton. I love how he can pack an entire joke into one frame, one expression. That's what I meant earlier when I said painting was easier for me than writing—I mean, I'm not great at it, but it lets me express something in one discrete image. If I want to write a scene or a joke, I have to set everything up, create context and mood and character, and that means filling half a page with words. If I want to have two pigeons feeling okay about an alien invasion, I can just paint it. And that's what I love about silent films and Buster Keaton especially—the images do all the talking.
DDC: I would not have immediately guessed Edward Hopper, but I totally see it, and I know what you mean by muted but vibrant. He uses primary colors, but sort of tones them down. Mixes some sadness into the paint or something. Edward Gorey, obviously. In fact, one of the images I chose to highlight is clearly of his world. I didn't know Maira Kalman at all, but now that I see her work, I see her all over your timeline.
Buster Keaton! I love this answer! I was hoping you were going to pick something like this. He's brilliant in a whole bunch of ways, but I hadn't thought about that aspect. And what you're saying about storytelling through simple imagery we could talk about for another fifteen pages.
LL: Your description of "sadness in the paint" for Hopper is perfect. That mood infuses everything. It's amazing. And glad you liked Kalman. Isn't she amazing? I hadn't heard of her before either, but a friend said some of my stuff reminded him of her, and I looked her up and just gasped. You need to read her books. Her writing matches her imagery so well, very stream of consciousness and absurdist but with wonderful heart.
DDC: Can you give me some approximation of your process. Do you begin work with the image of a spaceship and some pigeons in your head? And if so, where does an image like that come from, if you even know? It's so simple and yet so striking.
LL: This is the part where I feel like a bit of a fraud because I'm just winging it. I don't know if what I'm doing is correct or even if there is a correct. For my drawings, I usually know what I want the end result to be, but even then it morphs a bit as I go along. With paintings, I sometimes know what I want—like with the squirrels in “Rush Hour.” Or I start with an idea and it morphs into something else. Like the pigeons was actually going to be a dirigible, but I completely screwed it up. So, then I thought hey, UFO. But it needed something else. So, I thought on it until I saw it with the pigeons. Which is a long way of saying I don't know what I'm doing!
DDC: That sounds like you know exactly what you're doing. That sounds like a wonderful way to work that I wish to god I could tap into. And it's almost certainly why I relate it like I do. Like, I don't think it's possible to come up with the idea of pigeons looking at a UFO. I don't think our brains work like that. I think an image that striking has to be got to. If you had drawn a dirigible, it probably would have been a nice painting of a dirigible, but it seems less likely it'd have inspired me to quiz on you your creative process.
This reminds me of what I love about improv, and what a huge influence it had on my creative life. The best stuff is found. Or discovered. Often recovered from wreckage. You can't intellectualize a flash of brilliance. You can only recognize it and seize upon it. Start mining its potential. This, I'm convinced, is why creative people (the actually talented ones) so often have imposter's syndrome. We know just how much of what comes out of our heads just fell into it. And we just assume that everyone else is working with better equipment. They're not. I heard a quote recently. Probably from Rick Rubin: The muse will come to you eventually, but it has to find you working.
LL: Yes to everything you've just said here! Your assessment of imposter's syndrome is perfect. I had never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. Because jokes or pictures or words just fall into my brain, I've always assumed I'm just lazy and not doing any of this right. But you're right, there's skill in knowing how to spot those moments and being ready to catch them.
To go back to Buster Keaton, I always loved the fact that he and his writers would stop production every day to play baseball. It was how he got his ideas—they were never far from their project or ignoring it, they were just trying to shake those ideas loose. I've had so many friends ask me how I think of ideas and I feel like such a disappointment saying, "Well, I was making toast, and I saw a squirrel with a briefcase in my minds eye, and then I was sitting in traffic and saw a squirrel crossing a wire overhead, and then I saw a Hopper painting of a city street from above and… Wait, where are you going?" And they've lost interest and wandered off.
Honestly, though, the human brain is fascinating, capable of so many odd and great things. My mom, before she passed away, used to say, "I'm going to miss me when I'm gone." And that makes such perfect sense to me.
"I'm going to miss me when I'm gone" is going into my brain for good, now. Thanks, Liz’s mom!
What a nice conversation. It’s still amazing to me how good social media can be when it’s not being so fucking bad.
Please take some time to let some of Liz’s gorgeously weird imagery seep into your brain. With Liz’s permission, I posted a few of my favorites below.
And I’d also recommend you listen to Liz’s contribution to the comedic novelization of Independence Day, "In Which Jeff Goldblum Rides His Bike Like a Boss and Earth Is Invaded by 15-Mile-Wide Space Cookies," read, improbably, by Craig Ferguson.
Thanks so much for reading! It truly means the world to me! Be safe getting home, and don’t forget to tip your bartender!
Thanks for reading Weird Universe! Subscribe for free. Or don’t. Life is all about choices.
