ABOUT THE ARTIST
Welcome to the gorgeous limitless universe of imagination that lives inside our beautiful minds.
Hold on tight. If you’re looking for beige or gray art, get out now while you still can, sweetheart.
My world is an explosion of bright light and vibrant color, representing our universal hero’s journey through underworlds and back, up to the ecstatic heights of the sun only to have the wax holding our wings melt, only to have our ship’s crew open the bag of winds that blows us off course and prolongs our sea voyage back home by ten years. And yet, and yet, onward we ho. Hwaet! Odysseus, Penelope, Icarus, Persephone, Orpheus, they are all we, they are all me. Let us rejoice at our egregious humanity, the agony and the ecstasy. WE ARE ALIVE. Stranded on a tiny planet in the vastness of the cosmos on an unfathomably large timescale, our red blood beats unrelentingly through our fragile bodies. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, my dears. Let us delight in our wild hearts.
My name is Deborah Lithander, and I’m driven to seek out and experience the full gamut of what it is to be human. This pursuit has snatched me up to the far corners of the world; a childhood in La Paz, Bolivia, young adulthood in a village in West Africa (Togo) just south of the Sahara Desert, an artist residency in Brazil, study abroad in Italy and backpacking throughout Europe, long-term stints working in Washington, DC and the Democratic Republic of Congo, data collection in the most rural schools of Liberia, a day’s walk from any road traversable by car. I have marched deep into the heart of life, snuck across borders through dry riverbeds, was robbed at midnight at the docks of Genoa and danced Samba in a street parade in Rio de Janeiro. I have seen the Congo Basin Equatorial Rainforest from the cockpit of a 7-seater plane and felt impossibly small in an endless green horizon of indomitable nature. I have lost everything and come back. Twice. I negotiated the approval to fund an underbudget of $978k with a donor that does not approve underbudgets. I transmuted grief into paintings. I gave birth to humans. This is our condition. We bear impossible burdens, we alchemize. We overcome.
Through the delirious colors and dynamic movement as I paint I channel that divine light that is inside and beyond all of us. It is a sacred communion. My art is a celebration of the ineffable mystery of being alive, the irresistible exploration of the unknowable, and a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit. I invite you to immerse yourself in the profound resonance of your own journey as you experience these paintings, hero. Feel your nostalgia, your loss, your ecstasy. You are here, now. You are alive, now. Suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and here is a visual testament and celebration of your courage and an invitation to embark on your next electric adventure.