Hannah Lupton Reinhard is an artist based in LA. Her paintings are reflections of her experiences as a Jewish woman, both spiritually and socially. However, she is interested in creating a universal space, where the things she is thinking about and trying to depict are implicit and buried underneath color and sparkle, allowing viewers to take their own meaning from them. In some of her paintings, she uses Swarovski crystals, which gives a very special and recognizable aspect to her pieces. A process Reinhard’s started during her senior year at RISD. “When I moved to LA, I got a studio in the fashion district and would go on walks around the wholesale fabric and trim and beading stores because the colors and patterns were so inspiring. I found a wholesale crystal dealer that sells the most beautiful tiny crystals and just got hooked on the almost Pointillist effect that I could create by monotonously placing each crystal on the painting. Now I’m friends with the lady who runs the shop”, she explains.
In her work, she always has been interested in finding ways to make painting both funny and serious, which is what initially drew her to incorporate crystals. “There’s something almost silly about spending weeks on a painting and then defacing it with rhinestones as if I were a 10-year-old girl who just went on a shopping spree at Michael’s”, she adds. To the artist, it represents this childlike feminity and fantasies of being a princess, while also questioning the seriousness of painting. “Light is a major theme in my work, and the crystals interact with light (sunlight, fluorescent light, lack of light, etc.), giving the painting a physical presence that can only be understood when moving around it in space”, she says.
More to see on her Instagram account.
