About Me

 

Lorelei H Beckstrom is a painter and mixed media artist from the United States, born and raised in Minnesota.

In 2016 she shed nearly everything she owned and moved to London and then Dubai to work on commissions. She continued to move and work where desire and opportunity converged, until she experienced the Republic of Georgia. After a long-term artist residency high in the Caucasus Mountains, she made Georgia her home.

Lorelei was a self-proclaimed professional student. After studying painting, sculpture, graphic design, and psychology, she designed and built a sculptural solar home in the Rockies, which is her largest work of art to date.

She became dedicated to developing the arts culture in Colorado Springs, specifically the Alley Arts District. She co-owned Rubbish Gallery, and served as a co-curator and gallery assistant with Modbo and SPQR galleries.

After hanging up her gallerist hat, she was free to focus on her own work and began to exhibit more extensively throughout the region and beyond. She was featured in a surrealist exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where her paintings hung amongst those of Dail and Magritte. Shortly after, a large scale painting was acquired for the Sangre de Cristo Art Museum’s permanent collection.

This recognition launched the next stage of her career and helped her to realize her lifelong dream of being an artist while living abroad.

Lorelei’s paintings are in private collections in the U.S., Mexico, Republic of Georgia, United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates.

Wanderlust inspires her work, so she lives a life that can be carried in two suitcases and a tube of canvases.

 

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My greatest inspiration is the last decade I’ve spent traveling and living abroad, while continuing to paint full time. My work isn’t necessarily about specific places I’ve been, but is born of and infused with the rich landscape of sights, sounds, smells, people, and thoughts that I’ve experienced around the planet.

Without the defining tether of a permanent home, I get to easily evolve and meet myself as a person and an artist again and again, like it’s the very first time. Setting up studios regularly in new countries influences my paintings based not only on the size and materials, but the culture and atmosphere that welcome me.

My early work began as layered and etched plexiglass paintings, where the subjects were often merely etherial cast shadows, often displayed as installations. As time passed, I found myself wanting to bring my subjects more realistically into the world; so chose to rededicate myself to representational oil painting. Now, decades later, my subjects seem to be begging for even more solidity. I’ve recently begun experimenting with stuffed relief paintings, in which they can begin to break out beyond the picture frame. Perhaps one day they’ll finally crawl out and live amongst us.

I tend to work on many paintings at once; they grow up together and greatly influence each other, like siblings. We take turns guiding each other as we wander through both the inner and outer journeys. My job is listen and then to act. I am completely immersed and tend to live in the stories and worlds that unfold before my eyes.

I don’t package particular messages or emotions, but instead prefer to leave the door cracked open just enough to peek in. I want to inspire curiosity and childlike wonder- to entice the viewer to come in and be part of the storytelling.