Studio Visit & Interview With Lise Silva Gomes
Interview and Photographs by Brandon Joseph Baker
The studio of Lise Silva Gomes is bathed in a calm transcendental warm hue which reverberates through her art work. Amid stacks of brightly colored and organized swatches of fabric, works in progress, collections of vintage books, knots and plush fabric pieces there is a feeling of something mysterious stirring. I'm intrigued by the repetition of symbols in her art. Lips, eggs, hearts, phones, chalices, ladders and spirals all imply a visual conversation to be investigated. Lise prefers to leave the implied meaning intentionally open ended in her art but individual interpretation is encouraged. Her work combines symbols of memories, printed ephemera, fabric and fiber work, digital and traditional painting under vibrant jewel toned hues.
Lise’s work begins with intuition and reaching into her subconscious mind allowing symbols of layered metaphors and timeless archetypes to take shape from the ether. Her work feels like a beautiful dream you've had before but can't recall all the details.
Lise paints mysteries of the unconscious released from the deepest self. Her water based oils, acrylic or digital work creates a depth not only in perspective but in subject matter. Upon first glance the paintings feel approachable and simply constructed yet as the eye and mind dig into her compositions the repetition of symbols and their juxtaposition suggest the beginning of something deeper. Her appliqué work is guided by color and intuition, yet tactile on the surface. She harkens the process to slowly focusing a camera allowing what is obtuse and unknown to take shape. I sat with her and her gentle dog, Eric Andre, to discuss her process, her experience as an artist and writer, what role childhood continues to play in her creativity and how the unknown is revealing itself in the substratum of her art.
Interview
Thank you for taking the time to meet with me in your studio. I’ve been past Dime Studios several times while running but have never been inside. How long have you been here and how has the neighborhood and vibe changed over the years?
I think I moved into this studio in 2019. The neighborhood doesn’t seem like it has changed much since. It is a balance of industrial buildings, a lot of quiet storefronts, abandoned vintage signage, and longtime residents. The RVs lining the streets still interchange every few months, a brown striped one filled with cats, replaced by a dusty white one filled with crumpled papers. But the studio residents definitely have shifted as the Bay Area gets more / stays expensive. There are less visual artists in the building and more small businesses selling commercial goods.
When you get to the studio, what is the first thing you do when you start making, do you have any rituals you adhere to?
I would say finding the right thing to listen to is my primary ritual. I have to establish the vibe to conjure the spell. It could take up to 20-30 minutes to find the soundtrack. In hunting for the right movie to listen to, or music, or audiobook, or videos to assemble into a YouTube playlist, I’m affirming to myself which rabbit hole I’m going down. So it’s a way of intention setting and it also carries me into the mind state I need to tap into to do the work. Once I lock into something, I can work endlessly, if I don’t I get restless.
You use recurring symbols or icons in your art; lips, hearts, phones, chalices, profiles of faces, flowers, eggs, can you tell me more about the source of these symbols and what some of them represent to you as an artist?
Symbols, for me, are simple abbreviations for layered metaphors and timeless archetypes. They are a shorthand, like distilling a dissertation down to a catch phrase, and in their brevity have an air of mystery. It’s just understood that they carry an invisible weight.
Eggs are infinite possibilities; the peak of excitement is just before you find out what is inside a mystery vessel, they are kind of like the original unboxing experience. Chalices are vessels that hold space, contain energy, representing abundance. Phones are the anticipation of, or connection to, messages from the ether.
You mentioned that in your art some symbols represent influences from your childhood. As an artist who also uses symbols from my own childhood, like He-Man or comic books, what is your intent with these symbols in your art?
I don’t really have conscious intent, I’m drawing things out of myself that are usually locked within the space of my deepest self; my conscious self doesn’t know what I’m making until it’s done. The use of consistent symbols naturally develops into a visual language over time but it’s all intuitive in the moment. I learn about what my deepest self holds as my paintings develop.
Your studio is a collection of materials in a very nuanced palette from the orderly stacks of fabrics to the color swatches on the walls, what influences your choice of color palette in your art?
80s animation and old movies I grew up watching on hazy VHS, specifically movies from the Technicolor film era, were most influential on my color palette. I will never get over how perfectly composed the jewel tone palettes are in the scenes of movies like White Christmas or The Red Shoes.
Some of the pieces around your studio feel reminiscent of tarot cards. Am I projecting a connection that isn’t there or does tarot play a role in your practice?
Tarot and oracle are such perfect tools at the intersection of mystery, archetype, intuition, and chance. I wanted the Love Maps pieces to feel deeply powerful, timeless, and vague — open to individual interpretation and projection — like a tarot card. The paintings printed on acrylic are rectangular with rounded edges, with dimensions similar to a playing card. I wanted to evoke games, especially age-old divination games, with the work.
What is your painting process?
I paint with water soluble oils or acrylic, and digitally with an Apple pen and tablet. My process is very similar across all painting mediums. It’s kinda hard to explain because it’s very intuitive, it varies, and is guided by feel. Usually I’ll have a hazy vision of what I want to paint— often it starts with a color combination or an object that evokes some specific feeling. Then I try to gather image references that feel right for what I am trying to capture. Sometimes it can take hours of looking through roses to find the right rose, so the image reference gathering is one of the most time consuming parts of the paintings.
I love piecing together different image references from wildly different sources. Not that it’s intentional to do so but it’s usually what naturally results from being guided by feeling. I am a vintage paper ephemera collector so some of my images come from vintage books, ads, and magazines in my collection. Many of my images come from various internet sources and I feel an underlying aspect of my work is exploring and sending up internet lore as an extension of our collective consciousness.
For the show at Moth Belly Gallery, one of my paintings, “Two Of Hearts”, included an homage to the spiraling roses in Hitchcock’s eerily green tinted movie Vertigo, one of my all time favorite films. But it’s also a hybrid image, evoking a torn image of a rose painting that someone may have uploaded to Tumblr from a book or an ad. It floated around on Tumblr for about 10 years or more without a source. I’ve reverse Google image searched it and tried to find the origin or artist that painted it but never could. It seems like a lost scrap of internet lore. I feel it was inspired by the spiral roses in the movie Vertigo.
To see other artists evoking similar archetypes of symbols on this endless thread of legacy feels like the surfacing of the collective unconscious. The lack of credit or history for images that float around being posted and reposted for years gives a feeling of loss and mystery. I want to know where things come from, I want to know who made them. They say we are entering a digital dark age as the volume of content we are amassing lacks the resources to properly document the legacies, media monopolies remove content or place it behind paywalls, and technology formats change too fast to copy all the content over. I like to evoke lost ephemera — digital and real, through my image references.
Once I begin painting, I do what they traditionally tell you not to do and hyperfocus on small elements according to whim rather than build up the structures across the canvas at the same time. My style shifts as I work on different elements and in trying to evoke all these different image references that I piece together. My method gives my paintings a collage look but they are actually paintings, nothing is collaged.
You also work with fabric, can you tell me about this process and what you enjoy about that compared to the digital work I saw at “Trance & Emblem” show in September at Moth Belly Gallery?
For my appliqué work, I'm strongly guided by color and most of the compositions are completely materializing from the resonance I hear when I put swatches near each other. Fabric composition works similarly to painting, guided by intuition like I’m slowly focusing a camera lens from the most foggy and blown out hazy view gradually taking shape to form.
With the use of hearts in your work and your series “Love Maps” what role does love play in your artwork?
I think Love Maps was the first time I took on Love as a conscious concept. When women make art about love it’s usually instantly relegated to low art, so a lot of younger women who want to be taken seriously by the establishment never touch the concept. “In All About Love”, bell hooks points out that in life most men seem to show little regard for love on their list of priorities, know or care little about it, yet the only figures taken seriously as the voices of authority on the philosophy of Love are almost entirely men, from Rumi to Shakespeare. Women understand, value, and do most of the invisible labor as caregivers, yet society doesn’t honor women’s perspectives on love.
I like to lean into areas like this that would have made me uncomfortable when I was younger. I wanted to be taken seriously, so as a young woman I avoided putting much thought or consideration into making love the subject of my work. Last year at age 41, it felt important to enter that once uncomfortable space. The quest to find true connection, support, and loyalty meant rearranging one’s chosen family, romances, community and career pursuits in search of love collectively took on a new existential urgency since the pandemic.
In 2020 your art shifted gears after publishing your book Sacred Knots, can you tell me more about that shift and what you learned during the process?
My book came out November 2020 and the pandemic hit my small business hard. Releasing the book at that time turned out to be my phoenix moment— letting go of the fiber and knot work I covered in the book and creating a new phase of my work through painting, appliqué and video. Through so much instability and uncertainty, having a practice like knotting with large materials felt expensive, a risk. I spent hours and hours sitting at home learning digital drawing until I got a hold on my technique and that became my new practice. Nothing to physically store, no expensive materials, completely portable.
As an artist using symbols from your childhood who also works teaching art to children, what do you notice about the kids you teach now and does that influence your art?
I wouldn’t say they influence my art but they definitely give me more perspective on human psychology and remind me of the experience of being a little human. Recalling certain thoughts, feelings, and sense memories through working with them helps me stay connected to my childhood.
What are you working on now and is there a chance we can see it in the future?
I’m working on editing some videos about Love Maps and will release some new Love Maps stuff after the new year. I’m a Scorpio, I can say no more.
Thank you for meeting me for a studio visit. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting you and getting a chance to talk to you about your work. And meeting your sweet little doggo, Eric Andre.
