Meet the Artist

Lilly Buttitta is a Cleveland based painter, currently living in Philadelphia as she finishes her Masters in Painting at the Tyler School of Art.

“Longing is a part of the human condition that many struggle with, but the older I get the more I find myself embracing it. Longing, for me, is not something which anchors me to the past making me unable to move forward, but instead has me seeking a sense of belonging in the present to take with me into an uncertain future. My practice which is rooted in close looking and direct observation allows me to focus on the smallest moments as something worth remembering and carrying with me. A sort of record keeping or notation, I paint to memorialize ordinary moments that feel monumental because they demand I stop, breathe, and experience the quiet not only as a lonely space, but as something intimate and wholly entangled in the human experience.

I’m interested in the poetry of ordinary scenes, in the quiet interaction of existing within a space and cataloging the intricacies of how light scatters across a surface or the many subtleties housed within a shadow. My most recent body of work, a series of small scale interior paintings, relies heavily on my ability to capture these subtleties quickly before the light changes. The urgency I feel to find accurate form quickly, reflects the fleeting nature of these transitional spaces and the way our having inhabited them alters the course of our lives. Even returning to a painting at the same time each day does not guarantee me the same conditions, making each session a negotiation between what is already captured on my surface and the new surprises that greet me with each shift in weather and time. In that way, painting from direct observation allows me to acknowledge the slipperiness of time as we experience it. 

As a quiet observer, I seek to form an intimate relationship with these spaces I inhabit through this active listening, and hopefully offer the same experience to my audience. A quiet, contemplative space where the temperature shift within a stroke of paint, or the unraveling form of furniture in a dark room, asks them to stay as long as they like, or as long as they need.”