Studio Stories: Erin Lynn Welsh

I'm Erilyn Welch. I am a painter, a set designer, and most importantly, momma to my daughter. I grew up outside of Philadelphia in Georgetown, Pennsylvania, and I live between Brooklyn and Los Angeles. My work of California specifically started about 20 years ago, but I started going to California when I was a teenager to visit my family. So initially it started with Northern California, which is where my family was living, and I was really drawn to the way the diversity of the landscape from the cypress trees to the pine trees to then palm trees and succulents and just all of these different elements colliding together of like native and non-native plants. I started going to LA in my 20s because of work of set design, and I fell in love with Los Angeles. So I started focusing on the landscapes there and how nature and buildings collide together and how nature has a resistance with it. My friend Eduardo also started taking me on a lot of remote hikes that people don't know about, just how I found out about parts of Beaton Canyon and Altadena and also different areas throughout Los Angeles. And he started teaching me about the native versus non-native plants, and that is something that has influenced my work as of late. These current paintings are a response to memories of Los Angeles from the time I was in my 20s up until more recently, and because of becoming a new mom, I think more about memory. I think more about capturing that memory and what does that mean, especially with my daughter and how fleeing some memories can be and how time moves so fast. After the fires happening in California, I wanted to paint images of memories of like happy times in Los Angeles. I think holding on to anything that gives like a glimpse of a memory of a happy place, sort of like, I don't know if it's resistance, I don't know what it is, but it's something that I guess I needed for myself in order to start working on a larger scale project about the resistance of like plant life and how that also correlates with the resistance. Light has always been a huge influence in my work. I think that stems from having studied photography in college, and I used that for light in all of my photography work, and I do feel that translates back into my painting. Like I really actually brought photo back into the work in a strong way where I'm piecemealing together my own compositions instead of always just painting from an actual photo, but the idea of being able to have more control over my compositions instead of just one single image and be able to translate it into different ways has been a more exciting route in my work as of late. I do hope that the work encourages people to reconsider the environments around them. Landscapes aren't just scenery, they're living, breathing systems that surround all of us on a daily basis, whether we live in the city or we live out in the wilderness, and I think that the kind of resilience that nature has is similar to human resilience. If these paintings can help people to pause and notice the relationships around them with nature and what nature means to them, then that's all I can ask for in an interpretation.