Rough Sketches: Featured Artist: Lorretta Lux

Loretta Lux specializes in creating photos of children that are haunting, unique, and just a little bit strange. She started out as a painter but eventually changed her medium to photography after deciding painting was "too messy." Using photoshop, Lux to alter her images until they emit a vague but tangible distance between the audience and the subjects of her portraits. Though hesitant to spell out any specific meaning that is communicated through her works, she admits that they represent childhood and the experiences/interpretations that individuals can draw from those memories.

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The Paper Airplane, Photo, 2004

Lux employs a muted, pastelle color palette with no harsh light or shadow. Almost always, her subjects are children, dressed in vintage clothing and formally staged in isolated locations. Their expressions are blank, distancing themselves from their viewers. Finally, the strangest element of her work is the way she elongates their limbs, oversizes their heads and eyes, and distorts some of their features. The subjects seem to merge with their settings: backgrounds sometimes painted by Lux or taken from her photograph collection. Together, these changes make the childrean appear to be something out of a dream: realistic yet strange, unengaged, remote, and just a little bit impossible.

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Study of a Boy 1, Photo, 2002

Purposefully devoid of any indicator of specific time or space, the photographs do seem to imply a sense of narrative. In The Waiting Girl, Lux depicts a girl and a cat sitting on a couch, waiting for nothing in particular. As the artist herself described, "It's a picture about time, and timelessness. The girl and the cat are frozen in time. For me, they are sitting on the sofa as if they are waiting for eternity" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/nov/23/photography).

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