“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented — which is what fear and anxiety do to a person — into something whole.”
— Louise Bourgeois
Lucas Kerr grew up in rural Alabama, where art was a large part of his family's life. Eventually it stopped being just a pastime for him. it became a way to process memory, faith, and life, to make sense of the world around him and the world within.
Early on, he was drawn to the vivid color, beautiful fabrics, and lifelike scenes of Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker. Their paintings captured the texture of clothing, the life in someone's face, and the stories written into everyday scenes. Those early influences shaped his sense of storytelling, and how color, light, and the careful rendering of objects and people could carry emotion as clearly as words.
Later, discovering Frida Kahlo and Vladimir Kush opened the door to surrealism. Through them, he found his own artistic language. His work began to fuse realism and imagination, bringing together mental health, faith, and personal experience in his work.
As he moved from place to place, he continued to study and practice independently, learning from online art communities and through ongoing experimentation. Today, living in a rural setting not far from where he grew up, he paints as a way to understand and remember his past, and to ease the tension between the world he came from and the one he is still creating.
