A few summers ago Lumin came to stay with my family at our home in upstate New York. In the back of her car she had somehow managed to get three massive canvases that made up a six by ten and a half foot triptych. She was going to start a plein air painting somewhere on the property, and she quickly settled on a lush corner where a stream meets an alcove in the lake filled with water lilies and lined with hibiscus. Each day she lugged the three canvases down the hill and propped one on the easel and the rest against the canoe rack. It was hot and humid, and she was out there all day, alternating between the three, only breaking for lunch. One day a coyote we’d never seen but only heard in the distance came out of the woods and watched her paint before running away when we all came out to look.

 

Lumin Wakoa painting on Ballston Lake, New York at the home of Brian Caverly and Loie Hollowell, August 2023. Photo: Loie Hollowell.

With the exception of the large canvases, the rest of her set up was easily movable. On the grass she laid out a canvas drop cloth, on which was arranged, in no particular order, an assortment of Robert Doak and Williamsburg brand oil paints and a variety of long handled brushes (most of which had bristles worn down to her liking). Also in the grass sat some opened larger cans of paint, particularly a shade of light blue, from which she liberally scooped with a few different palette knives. Her palette, a thin piece of glass with a backing of light gray, rested on the arms of a plastic lawn chair she pulled away from the fire pit nearby. Large areas of paint mixed with terpenoid took over the palette. The canvas, propped on a simple three legged wooden tripod, sat in front of her palette with enough space between so she could easily swivel between the two. The size of the canvas made it so that she would have to reach to the top as well as get on her knees to paint the bottom. As protection against the sun and paint she wore a white baseball cap, hair tucked up and under and a short sleeve, thin, white cotton coverall, covered in paint.

When I came out to see her progress she joked that it didn’t really look like what she was looking at and that she had no idea where the painting was going. Despite that, her mark making was confident and deftly applied. Wet washy areas of green and blue were overlaid with thick lines of different shades of the same, along with browns, reds, pinks and purples. By the end of her few day painting session, every square inch of canvas was covered and it very much captured what she was actually looking at.

After returning to the city, Lumin continued to work on the triptych in her studio. When it was finally exhibited, there were hits of the marks she had made en plein air, but now the piece was glowing with a kind of energy that encapsulated the whole of the feeling of being down by the lake without really depicting our lake at all, but perhaps many of the lakes she had sat by in her life. The painting was titled, From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.

In an interview that Lumin conducted with the art magazine Maake about six years ago, the interviewer asked how writing plays a role in her process. She answered:

Writing, especially writing poetry, has been helpful in the studio because I see it as kind of an equivalent for what I’d like my paintings to do. I’m not interested in linear narrative, but I am very much interested in the specificity of experience. Whether I’m looking at paintings or making them, I want to be aware of difference; I want to be aware of the act of looking before I am aware of the brand. Certain poets/writers have this amazing ability to give you everything, the time of day, the weight, the light, and at the same time they give you nothing, no back story, no logic. Reality is upended and in the process the act of experience is revealed.

That description of what poetry did for Lumin is what her paintings do for me and for so many who love Lumin’s work. They make us aware of the act of looking. What you are seeing comes in and out of focus; it morphs from one thing to another; reality is upended. Life is death in a wilted bouquet, and death is life as skeletons dance and embrace in shades of blue. Lumin was a poet in paint, in words and in life. She showed us what we could not see.