My paintings are feelings, wordless poems, and they represent things that I cannot say but deeply need to express. They are open windows into my inner world. I use painting and art-making as a wordless language that allows me to reckon with emotions through abstract imagery that in turn has its own unique emotional resonance for the viewer.
I love the process of making art, almost like a ritual or meditation. My creative process is very intuitive, and I am highly focused on mark-making and laying down a rich vocabulary of color and textures in each piece. I like to extensively work the surface, but somehow end up with a delicate end result, experimenting with different ways to get marks onto the surface with unusual techniques, including by piping paint, or using needles and syringes to deposit paint, denting the surface and scraping over paint to leave areas of color.
Currently, my work explores visual boundaries and transparency, with pieces created by both adding and subtracting paint and materials to the surface. I layer paint and then sand it down, scrape and pull at the surface to create textures, and work with the interplay of shiny vs. matte; rough vs. smooth; and saturated color vs. soft. My hope is that the viewer feels some of the poetry that I felt when making the work, and through that, that we can share a powerful bond.
Artist Biography
Zoë Lukas received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and divides her time between paintings and cakes. During the day, she designs cakes at Whipped Bakeshop, the award-winning Fishtown bakery she founded in 2009 with her husband Brennen. At night, Zoë can often be found in her home studio creating abstract paintings and collages with tools ranging from brushes to pins, old maps, nails, glue and sandpaper. You can find Zoë’s work on Instagram @zoe.lukas and @whippedbakeshop.
