Meet Lydia Cruz | Illustrator // Writer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lydia Cruz and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lydia, do you have some perspective or insight you can share with us on the question of when someone should give up versus when they should keep going?
This is a tricky one, though I would proffer a bit of a different perspective and say the question is more how do you know whether to keep going or if it’s time to pivot, rather than give up. I find that for me in my own creative practice it often pays off to pay close attention to what I am feeling drawn to in the moment, whether that’s a subject, a particular medium, a size of paper, anything. This has been true for me for many years, but now as an artist with an invisible physical disability that greatly affects my stamina, it’s especially prescient. If I have been working on pieces in pen, but then suddenly find myself curious about experimenting with charcoal, I will step away from what I’ve been working on and try the charcoal. It doesn’t mean the pieces I make are all successful (though this is exactly how I ended up creating all the work for my last solo show), but I find my chances for creating something meaningful are greatly increased if I’m feeling especially connected to the piece. That said, while working on this last show, I began a large (for me) landscape piece. Unable to finish it in a single sitting, I found myself more drawn to other ideas when I returned to work on the piece the following day. So I set the landscape aside. Days passed, weeks passed, months passed and as the opening for the show approached, the landscape loomed large as something I knew I wanted to include, but had no real desire to work on. Eventually, the week before the show, I buckled down and completed the piece despite not feeling very inspired and was really glad to be able to include it in the larger body of work. So. I think for me, it’s a combination of instinct and priorities. Trust yourself, even if you only have an inkling of a possibility of something worthwhile. You never know what might be waiting for you just around that corner. And then, sometimes, you return to what you had placed on pause because, in my case, having the piece in the show was a higher priority for me than waiting until I felt excited about it again. There’s more freedom to operate this way within an independent creative practice as compared to more formalized business endeavors, but I’ve found this approach has lead me to some of my best work.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I started writing at a very young age, but didn’t start drawing in earnest until I was twenty and halfway through my second year of college. I had taken general art classes in middle school and did printmaking and ceramics in high school, but, save for a few exceptions, didn’t like the result whenever I tried to draw. I was part of an international postcard exchange during my second year of college and, while home for Thanksgiving break, spontaneously decided to draw my house on a blank postcard to send to someone. I had always felt intimidated by Color and Shadow, but had never thought to eliminate those elements until sitting down in front of my house. Removing these features made drawing feel infinitely more accessible and, pleased with the black and white line drawing of the house, I would go on to do a few portraits of my brother and a visiting musician at my parents’ coffee shop. When I returned to school in New York, I was able to incorporate more of these portraits into my letterpress printmaking coursework (I would take pictures of people walking down the street, draw them, then print them for class) and I was away. The next year, I studied abroad in Scotland and landed the position of Designer for the On the Rocks Arts Festival, where I was able to run wild with design, illustration, and photography and upon returning to Sarah Lawrence did another year of printmaking and worked doing primarily illustration for the school’s IT department. After graduation I continued doing commission work and having periodic solo shows and in 2020 put out my first full length illustrated memoir.

The turning point for me was realizing, or perhaps remembering, that there were no rules. I didn’t have to use color if I didn’t want to, just like I didn’t have to shade anything. As soon as I stepped away from those false requirements, I was able to approach drawing more freely. Some time would pass before I would come to understand the question for me when it came to drawing was not How do I draw? but rather, How do I see? It had taken me many years to realize that the way I understood the visual world around me was through Line rather than Color or Shadow. Once I was able to identify how I saw things, it empowered me to try to represent them, to translate the things around me onto paper. My approach then, as it largely still is now, was to reproduce those lines with as much fidelity as possible—I will draw at different speeds and/or with different quantities of time spent looking (or not looking) at the paper, which effects the style of the piece, but I rarely intentionally stylize. I find myself most interested in the meaning to be found in the details that are already there, rather than any I might create. I remember a professor once saying, describing creative nonfiction writing, We are not reporting on these experiences, we are narrativizing them, crafting into a story. It’s creative writing, not journalism. I felt then that what I was actually most interested in was recording the world around me, with as much fidelity as possible, and presenting it, a work unto itself. There is, of course, always crafting involved—you cannot observe and record anything without affecting it and memory is not if not unreliable—but I have now spent many hundreds of hours drawing (and writing) over the last ten years, and, while my work has recently expanded into examining my own interior landscape, I still find myself entranced by the patterns and details intrinsic to the daily world around us and the inherent dignity to be found in another human walking down the street.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Pop over to Bindle in Fort Collins for coffee and breakfast pastries, back to Greeley and to Weldwerks for lunch and a cheeky early afternoon beer, fries and pinball at Stella’s, tacos at Luna’s for dinner and then across the street to the Speakeasy for cocktails.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Jake Slichter : master of tradeoffs, bridges, and The Executive

Website: www.lydiacruz.com

Image Credits
Seth McClain