Bio

 

Lulu Schwall is a mixed media artist who paints what it means to be held, safe enough to be fully present in life and leisure. Because of this revelation, she calls the world in which she paints "The Adorned Garden." Lately she has been awakened to her love of lush green manicured gardens — gardens, lakes at sunset, women who belong to themselves, flowers worn as crowns. Any place where light and adornment hold you safe enough to be present.

Before painting full time, she was a marriage and family therapist and a makeup artist. As a therapist she learned to hold space safe enough for people to talk honestly with her. As a makeup artist, she learned adornment holds us the same way, how a red lip, a chosen earring, or a tended table says I am here on purpose. That same attention is in her paintings, where pattern presses in but does not crush, and light holds the figure at the edge.

Her work moves from Vermeer to Vogue to pool light: portraita or softly held figures, gardens, turquoise lakes at pink sunset, and thick impasto flowers worn like crowns. Whether she paints women, friends, or anyone who wants to belong to themselves, she is after the same moment, when they feel seen and held in utmost regard and unconditional love, safely at home in their surroundings.

 

The Adorned Garden is her attempt to remember and to offer what it feels like to be in right relationship with beauty. Not performing for it. Not striving for it. Held by it. In a world that so often asks women in particular to be vigilant, to scan the room, to hold everyone else, she paints the opposite: a world where the room holds you

She lives and creates in Bon Air, just outside Richmond, Virginia. Alongside her studio work she also paints commissions.