The Brooklyn Rail

“Abstraction as something that happens in the head interests me very much. Abstraction as a formalist idea for painting does not interest me.”
— Charline von Heyl, Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting, pg. 81, 2009

“I’m not imaginative enough to make a painting without observation.”
— Lois Dodd, Financial Times, August 15, 2025

As I watched Lumin Wakoa’s paintings develop from 2016 through last year, I came to realize that her breakthrough came through the most practical of means. She initially thought it too obvious to view her immediate vicinity as the subject for her work. But before she pursued a deeper connection to nature through painting, Lumin did a lot of heavy lifting through long, searching hours of studio labor. In this earlier period of work, from 2016–2020, Lumin was seeking a deeper place that echoed her upbringing in rural Northern Florida by tapping into abstraction as a self-sustaining ecosystem. This tactic of looking inward in order to visually channel past experiences served her later in making the work that she became more widely known for: her powerfully unique take on plein air painting through capturing/depicting the fleeting nature of the world around her.

When I first met Lumin in 2011, she had recently completed her MFA at RISD and I had just wrapped up a residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. Around this time, I began working on curatorial projects, and in 2015, joined as a Co-Director of Present Company, a Brooklyn-based exhibition and social space. After including some of Lumin’s work at the Untitled fair in Miami, we offered her a two-person exhibition alongside Claudia Peña Salinas in early 2017. The idea for the show came after seeing the 2016 exhibition The Keeper at The New Museum, which included Hilma af Klint paintings paired with sculptures by Carol Bove and Carlo Scarpa. Similarly, at Present Company, we installed the work as a series of conversations to show two artists who were both close friends and shared a personal history in the overlapping of their respective practices.

Lumin’s paintings that we included in that show, titled Meridian Atlas, were strangely confident in their wandering nature and easily able to hold a large wall despite their diminutive scale. The paintings were all oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches or less, vertical and horizontal, installed in a straight line around the gallery. There was something uncanny about these small, book-sized paintings. They were ethereal and specific at the same time. She was suggesting elements of landscape, but wasn’t following the rules of nature or well-worn tropes of abstraction. Even in their elusive state, this was clearly hard-fought imagery from Lumin’s imagination that did not reveal its labor or struggle that she elevated through her unconventional color combinations and beguiling surface treatments.

I find myself comparing Lumin’s path from painting internal to external stimuli to that of Philip Guston, who discovered early on that he wanted to paint from a critical social justice standpoint, but it was during his Abstract Expressionist period where he learned how to truly sling his materials. When he arrived at the later works, he was finally able to combine his lived subjectivity with a stylistic freedom not previously available. Lumin desired a different kind of purity, originating in nature, through which she was able to gain full understanding of her own surface variation and brushwork. This was the reverse of Guston’s development—whereas his abstract paintings taught him how to paint, Lumin’s abstract paintings taught her how to see.

Following the Present Company show, around 2018, Lumin’s works continued down an incubative path, as she began to flirt with hints of fauna, flora, textiles, early bones, and seascapes. Rhythm and pattern dissolve and deconstruct, offset by rugged blooms of color, and when taken together pull focus towards some new thing she has created. In retrospect, Lumin’s seemingly transitional paintings were not just a stepping stone to get to where she was going, but an important body of work within her trajectory. These were pictures on the edge of clearly identifying themselves, but never quite revealing their referent.

Lumin’s eventual shift to painting from life was practical and directly in front of her the entire time. Stepping out of the studio streamlined her production and helped her cope with the realities of becoming a parent. She moved around outdoors, and painted in cemeteries, fields, and gardens. The hardest and easiest thing in the world to paint is a flower–or a skeleton, for that matter. It has been done before, countless times. In Lumin’s case, when she did begin to scale up her work around 2021, it was with these familiar subjects that she was able to go further, finding truth in their life forms and structures that she had spent so much of her isolated time seeking out. Yet scaling up the canvases did not rob her work of its powerful intimacy. She may have appeared to be extending a plein air tradition, but for Lumin this required breaking with her own past in which she reinvented the wheel in every painting.

By the time Lumin arrived at her final body of work shown at Various Small Fires in Seoul in summer 2024, she had come full circle to the early inventiveness found by looking further inside of herself. Nature does not think, it just exists, and as with all living things, knows its temporary place in the world. Lumin embodied these forces that shaped her, and the paintings exuded that through a life well-lived.

Friendship can sway how accurately artists assess each other’s work. Lumin was beautifully charismatic, but it was her unusually deep feeling and empathy that set her apart from most of the painters I know. In this case, I think we became friends because of the work she made. In one of our last painting conversations prior to her diagnosis, I reminded her not to push herself too hard, that she had achieved what she set out to do, and had all the time in the world.