Until meeting the artist Lucy Blake-Elahi the other afternoon, I had tended to blur the intellectual differences between those who draw for a living and athletes who think grammar is your mother’s mother.
Never again.
With a disarming cerebral flourish, Ms. Blake-Elahi, a product of P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, seared a whirling path across a vast landscape of broad and deep passions that drive her artistry.
If you have intersected with the art community around Los Angeles any time in the last 20 years, you probably have encountered the imaginative, unpredictable imagery of Ms. Blake-Elahi.
For three weeks, starting on Sunday in Santa Monica, she is launching her latest solo exhibit, a series of hand-colored prints designed to make you pause and ponder.
New Themes
Returning from last year’s evocative one-woman exhibition at West Los Angeles College — “The Rape of the Sumerians: Looting the Iraq Museum” — the artist opens her new exhibit, “Come Here! … Go Away!”, with a 1 o’clock reception on Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica, 1260 18th St., at the intersection of Arizona Street.
Up Closer
Ms. Blake-Elahi persisted to get where she is today in the fullness of her personal and professional maturity.
“It’s really a challenge to maintain a healthy brain,” she says of the journey.
Her steel-edged persistence is the vehicle that has propelled her through clouds of doubt and darker years when peers and lesser types seemed to run right past her to gain recognition she cherished.
(When one-track thinking works out, you hail it as “persistence.” When it doesn’t, that is called “stubbornness.”)
Call It by Any Name
Starting in the second grade, she needed to practice persistence to ward off the resistance she would later face at home.
Born into what she describes as a “lower, middle, middle class” family in Brooklyn, she said her parents pretty plain-thinking people who practiced, and preached, practicality, scorning as frivolous that which seemed risky.
They believed that you shouldn’t dare sally into a field as high-risk as painting and drawing until your personal security was irreversibly assured, until you were safely tucked inside the bosom of retirement.
She was a well-seasoned married lady by the time her breakthrough came, and public art commissions began coming her way.
In earlier years, true to her family’s wishes, Ms. Blake-Elahi became a teacher in LAUSD — for pragmatic, bill-paying reasons.
But what kept her going in (artistically) thinner times?
“I had and have a lot of support,” she says. “My husband, Faz Elahi, who used to be the Redevelopment supervisor in Culver City. I have a bunch of women artist friends through the Women’s Caucus for Art, a national organization. Also an organization called No Limits for Women Artists, started by Betsy Damon, a public artist, who has a website called keepersofthewaters.org, to make sure the planet gets clean water.”
Do Not Be Like Others
You may notice passion patterns beginning to emerge. These areas became less arcane when Ms. Blake-Elahi moved on to her message as an artist.
Surely she had a statement to share with the art world. Or did she mainly just strive to be free?
“When I read Shakespeare, as a kid,” she said, “and then I read about Hitler, and then I read about other people, and then I had sexual fantasies or whatever. It was, like, how come we can all think of the same things? Hitler, Shakespeare and little me at 14? How come we all think in the same ways, even if people think in different degrees about sexuality, sensuality, humanity?
“Then I read about what Sigmund Freud’s ideas of humor were, and what jokes are.
“There was so much universality, I decided I needed to listen to my own story. That’s a hard job, because I have to hack away so much that isn’t mine.
“I have two particular passions, the environment — I am a very active member of the Ballona Creek Renaissance — and the other is love, humanity, physical closeness.
Which Way Is It?
“The show I am doing at the Unitarian Church in Santa Monica is ‘Come Here! …Go Away!’ Within a circle in a rectangle, there are two figures drawn from Hellenistic Roman sculptures, like a nymph and satyr. The nymph and the satyr are playing. Even though they are struggling, there is that sense of sensual play in the middle.
“You know, you want somebody close, and then, okay, go away for awhile.”
Is this theme a metaphor for Ms. Blake-Elahi’s real life?
“Here is what it means,” she says. “I l-o-v-e my husband. But we are in the same house. All the time. My studio is upstairs. He is working downstairs. And it’s, like, when he’s gone to do work, whew, the house is my own.
“I love closeness, and I love being alone.”
The second theme of Ms. Blake-Elahi’s Santa Monica show, “The Burden of Unused Wings,” is provocative, arguably esoteric, and demands that a truly appreciative viewer must be a thinker, too.
For lovers of abstraction, this series of drypoint and monotype prints will allow them to frolic for awhile in paradise.
She says the images lament opportunities missed.
“We are all given many skills, talents and interests,” Ms. Blake-Elahi says. “How deep is the well of creativity? How high is flight?
“Struggle is one of mankind’s most universal and evocative subjects. Struggle is relevant to all communities. Conflict evokes a multitude of images and associations. They are personal and they are collective.”
What are we to conclude from this?
“Each viewer,” she says, “must relate to this struggle from his or her own personal perspective.”
You may contact the artist at lblakeelahi@yahoo.com or visit her website at www.lucyblake-elahi.com