The Brooklyn Rail

When I met Lumin in 2014, questions of what her paintings were, where they started, and where they were going were all up in the air. Back then, she didn’t paint from visual references and made no preparatory drawings or studies. She often seemed to be reinventing the wheel with each new piece, which at times made her feel lost and frustrated, but also gave her work its magic. When I look back at her paintings now, I’m awed by their beauty, and by the distinctive brushwork she always employed, as well as by how her work evolved through the pressures of increasing career success.

Even a decade ago, Lumin had a kind of painterly touch, a way of combining longer gestures with shorter ones, imagery floating in and out of an atmosphere of pigment. Lumin talked about sitting on the porch as a child with her father, who would say, “Let’s see.” They would look out at nature, what I imagine to be the various swaying trees, bushes, vines, and birds of northern Florida, and let the definitions of objects, the lines between one thing and another, dissolve into an experience of vision without cognition, of light and matter moving and flowing together and apart.

Lumin’s work reached a new level in 2020 during the pandemic, when she began working outside, in Queens, near her family. At first, she painted in her front garden, which you walk through to enter her house: a tumble of roses, morning glories, tomatoes, scooters, basil, irises, petunias, and bicycles. She had grown up in such a wild natural environment in northern Florida, which was at the core of who she was. Painting outside brought these two crucial elements of her life together: nature and creativity.

She saw her garden, and the trees beyond, the way she saw with her dad on the porch, matter dissolving and reconstituting. The marks she made on her linen canvases created a corresponding atmosphere of brushstrokes. The roses she painted from her garden seemed to gather from the bottom edge of the canvas, swirling upwards like a tornado, exerting a frenzied, outward pressure that could almost break out into the world.

Lumin’s work was so much about touch, the way the brush hits the canvas, and the size of the mark relative to the size of the support. It’s not easy to transition to a five or ten times bigger scale and maintain the sensitivity, the exquisite alertness of touch. But Lumin rose to the occasion. As the canvases got bigger, became diptychs and triptychs loaded into a UHaul for an upstate plein air sojourn, Lumin’s marks broadened, her gestures faster and more expansive.

In hindsight, it’s hard not to interpret Lumin’s work as a premonition of her own untimely death. The plein air paintings in the cemetery, the many skeletons and skulls, contrasting with teeming, swirling color and light. At the time, I read the more macabre elements in her work as references to the father, younger brother, and best friend she lost in her adolescence. Lumin had seen more than her fair share of death. Maybe it made her more sharply aware of all the fleeting natural beauty she painted.

I remember often trying to dissuade Lumin from doubting the beauty and power of her own work. Perhaps that process of questioning everything made it hard for her to see clearly how breathtaking and special her paintings truly were. They were captivating at the intimate scale of 8 x 10 inches. When her opportunities and studio time increased, the paintings became monumental and better than ever in their body-enveloping splendor.

She met every deadline with a new, stunning body of work, even while the pressure to produce took a toll on her psyche. Making paintings during the winter months was particularly challenging because Lumin couldn’t paint outside. Still, she brought flowers and potted trees into her studio, and those paintings were just as vibrant as the plein air works.

Lumin’s anxiety intensified leading up to her last two shows, at Harper’s in Chelsea and Various Small Fires in Seoul. When I saw her, she often broke into tears about her work and how afraid she was to fail. I tried so hard to convince her that she was succeeding wildly, that these negative perceptions were just in her head, they weren’t an accurate reflection of her beautiful paintings. Perhaps the brain tumor we didn’t yet know about was affecting her thoughts and exacerbating her fears.

Once Lumin received her terminal diagnosis that same spring, all her worries about showing her work vanished. She continued to make art when she could, often in the company of friends: watercolors, life drawings, ceramics, and one self-portrait on canvas. She spent her last year of life surrounded by loved ones, receiving medical treatments as well as taking a few meaningful last trips to Maine, Florida, and the Caribbean.

Lumin’s powerful work is the best record we have of her unique and unpredictable process, her love of nature, and her lyrical, intuitive brushwork. Her paintings will continue to brighten our world, even as we mourn her loss.