She’s alive! This is the completed piece for @beautifulbizarremagazine ’s Fable & Folklore show @coprogallery on May 4.
John was out of town when I was completing this. We spent quite a bit of time together—me, staring at her every detail, she, smiling back at me. I’m convinced she haunted my house. While he was away, my bedroom lights would turn on at 4 am & the refrigerator would randomly blast music. She came to life on the day of the eclipse & is now whole. For those unfamiliar with La Llorona, I’ve included the story below.
Growing up in one of the most haunted cities in the states, there was no shortage of folklore. I spent an inordinate amount of time opening myself to the spirit world. As a teen, an exciting night out with friends usually involved hanging out in cemeteries on the south side, driving over the Donkey Lady Bridge, or cruising the haunted tracks by the old missions of San Antonio, Texas. Folklore either brings us closer to our ancestors or is often used to scare us into good behavior. Either way, it is an exciting pastime to immerse oneself in.
Just outside of my hometown is Woman Hollering Creek after one of the big players of folklore known as La Llorona or the weeping woman. In our lore, she can be found at the edges of any secluded body of water where she moans & cries for her lost children.
There are many versions of the story. I’m curious to hear yours. Ours involves a young, beautiful woman from a small town who saw a handsome, wealthy man ride into town on a horse. He immediately caught her eye, and she, his. They fell in love, and over time had two children, one boy, and one girl. The husband adored the children & showered them with love & gifts. As time passed, the husband became distant toward the wife & would often stay out late at night or not come home at all. The wife learned that he was having an affair &, in an act of retribution, took what he loved most, the children, & lured them to the creek where she drowned them. Shortly after, the husband realized what she had done & left her altogether. From that day on, she’s said to be heard crying by creeks and rivers in the night, begging for her children to come home. Enjoy X
Stickers and prints are up in the shop. Some of the prints are sold out but there are still a few available. I’ve been meaning to share this new oil painting I completed for my dear friend and talented writer @asocialleaderhaus ’s upcoming book @thelostpleiades . A fantastic read coming soon. From the beginning to the end, I was lost in her world. I’m honored to have been asked to complete the cover for her very first publication. As you know, I adore hands. Every museum I’ve ever visited, I am pulled into the second portrait of the clasped hands. I have hundreds of photos of just this. I wanted to highlight this portion of the portrait and bring attention to the serenity and energy that we exude in our hands. I haven’t painted in a very long time so this was a challenge to switch from graphite back to color and oil. I’m having it professionally photographed and will share better pics with the correct color balance once I do that. Hope you’re all having a wonderful Sunday. Thank you so much for your unending support of my work. I will continue to work on making smaller original works so stay tuned. #thepeoplesartist2026
My first piece of the new year. This marks my journey back to oil painting. For those who only know me for my pencil work, I began oil painting around 1995 while in my undergraduate degree in science. One year later, after graduating, I attended the San Francisco Art Institute. While I also pursued printmaking, photography and other interdisciplinary arts, I spent the majority of my time oil painting. Painting was a self directed study so most of what I learned was self taught as our school encouraged us to pursue our own individual style of creating and directed us mostly through intensive peer critiques. It’s exciting to be back mixing color and examining shapes in an old familiar medium. I have a deep respect for what pencils have taught me in the last ten years. This piece will be shown this Wednesday January 19-23 @laartshow in downtown Los Angeles and will be available through @coprogallery . Dimensions are 20x 30 inches framed. X #losangeles #dtla #bodyofchrist #crucifix #oilpainting #thepeoplesartist2026 #darkart
About 7 months ago, you witnessed me open a perfume shop and probably wondered what was happening and where this seemingly unexpected transition came from. If you didn’t know, well, I opened a perfume shop in the arts district of Los Angeles. I want to share with you the story and origins of Son of Wolf.
Why Son of Wolf? Historically, surnames were, by tradition, patriarchal. Children typically took their father’s name to indicate legitimacy, receive inheritance rights, maintain the continuation of a family line and to preserve consistent legal records. Because women would take their husband’s surname in marriage, it was an inconsistent reflection of their lineage. Women had no rights under most medieval European legal frameworks, could not own property, enter contracts, or hold any type of office independently, yet were treated as currency, wed into unions for wealth, deployed as political alliances, or pursued for their inheritances. Essentially, women were a break in the chain of consistency and men were the units of legal accountability.
Fast forward to modern day. I was born the last daughter of five children under the name of Lopez, three sons and two daughters. My father wanted a daughter badly but continued to have son after son, until finally my sister was born. Thinking the family was complete, along came me one year later. I was the final and “accidental” child or as I like to refer to myself, the love child.
The Lopez family name stems from the Latin word lupus or wolf, translating to son of Lope or son of wolf. I have carried this name through every chapter of my life, building my art career, my reputation, and my place in the world around it. I am proud of it, even if at some points in a less accepting time, I was afraid to share it for reasons of discrimination. I had also, in my own right, done what sons were expected to do. I attained property, held leadership, and carried the name forward. For this reason, I am Son of Wolf.
You’ll find me there Thursday through Saturday, & by appointment for any other time or after hour perfume emergencies. @sonofwolfla
This story to be continued
#perfumelovers #losangelesperfumeshopping #perfumeshop
It’s the little things. I understand the function of small color studies but have always had a hard time with them. Not in making them but in that they take the excitement out of just jumping into the real thing like a wild animal. Instead, I create color swatch charts or graphite tonality charts to guide me, but much of the color work is improvisation or experimentation. Either way, I’ve been enjoying these smaller pieces. They aren’t studies. They are just small paintings of bigger ideas. They provide me with a quick sense of completion and I’ve needed that quite a bit lately. They let me investigate ideas and help me decide if I really want to pursue them further or if they will only ever exist in this microcosm. Sometimes just getting the idea out is enough and makes room for the bigger, more important things.
Speaking of important things, voting begins today for The People’s Artist, which I was accepted into. If you’d like to vote for me, you can find a link in my bio and can view my submitted work on my profile page here:
/2026/lizz-lopez
This is:
Girl with Hare
4 x 6 inches
Oil on wood panel (SOLD)
Model @jmoloney1
Dress worn: vintage (as seen in photos)
“The Art of Elysium uses creativity as a catalyst for healing and connection. Since 1997, the organization has empowered artists and communities through tailor-made art programs designed to help people overcome social and emotional challenges.“
Little things. This is a small piece I created in the days surrounding Easter Sunday as I began to get some thoughts and emotions out on 4 x 6 inches.
This piece is oil on wood and will be part of a larger collection of small pieces I’ll be releasing in the next few weeks.
Hope you’re having a killer Wednesday
X
#cositas #oilpainting #sacrificiallamb
Intuition is one of our greatest gifts, yet one of the first things we question. We’re quick to override ourselves with doubt, defer to outside opinion, or explain it away entirely, as though what arises from within us could never match the authority of what comes from outside.
In my 18th year of life, I read Plato’s the Meno & it blew my little mind. In the book, Socrates introduces a theory of recollection by using a slave boy to show that knowledge is innate & can be recalled. In essence, you’re all-knowing but just need reminding. He gives him a geometrical problem & through questions & prompting, the boy solves it implying the knowledge was already there. Many books, once read, make you realize, “Oh yeah, I already knew that.” That capacity lives in everyone, a quiet comprehensive inheritance.
This drawing, created in 2018, is titled “Intuition & the Arcane,” an ode to that concept.
Art opens the gate of intuition and gives insight into a world that exists on another plane. The peace it brings to an overactive mind is addictive & the euphoria it induces can often times make you feel you might be insane. At times, the thoughts that come to mind while creating don’t feel like yours. They arrive uninvited & fully formed, as though passed through from somewhere beyond. More often than not, they sneak their way into reality in some form or another. The longer you create, the more you develop an eye for what others can’t see, the hidden, the arcane. Creation, it turns out, is a kind of portal.
These days, I’ve been living off intuition. I set up my easel behind the counter where I draw between customers. I spend the day discussing perfume, experience & the senses. It’s woken a latent knowledge & subconscious message delivery system that comes from speaking with strangers. Sometimes they’ll unknowingly make a reference to something I recently dreamt of, sometimes multiple people will find the shop by accident & share stories relevant to my circumstances, sometimes they’ll come in and just say something I needed to hear. Wild.
Anyway, enjoy some of this drawing process as I work on a new drawing I’ll share with you soon. Hope you’re having a killer Thursday X
It’s been 200 years since the first documented photograph was captured in 1826. In its infancy, photography was primarily used for scientific documentation, landscapes, and still images. By the late 1830s, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, a painter and printmaker, popularized the daguerreotype for portraiture and began to bend the traditions of art in ways that would eventually affect painting. Historically, painted portraits were unaffordable to the general public. The advent of photography began to turn the tide, offering a more accessible alternative, while also setting off a whirlwind of art movements that began to emerge in the 1860s.
It’s interesting to look back through history and see how many painters embraced photography. In the 1850s, a small handful of visual artists began experimenting with photography in a more artistic manner. They strived to emulate paintings by manipulating the process, using composite images, blurring techniques, and employing photos as reference material. In my opinion, Oscar Gustave Rejlander was the greatest early pioneer of the movement later known as Pictorialism, which was most popular from the 1880s to the early 1900s. Rejlander was a printmaker and painter who’s said to have left painting after becoming enamored with how effective photography was at capturing drapery. This was his Study of John the Baptist, intended for a larger composition that was, sadly, never realized.
At the beginning of the year, I decided to get my hands moving and thought it natural to take one of his works and reinterpret it in a medium he had departed from. I initially planned to take the image in an entirely different direction, but the goal was to complete the exercise by the end of the month. So here we are, with January behind us, and here it is, unfinished, just as his project was.
Not a lot of action in slow art but please enjoy my collection of still images as the drawing
If you’re in town this weekend, you’ll find this recent drawing at the LA art show in downtown Los Angeles exhibited alongside many of the wonderful works @coprogallery ’s booth #1004 until Sunday January 11th. This piece was originally created for the Heavy Metal magazine exhibition last Fall.
@laartshow is the most comprehensive international contemporary art show in America and I’m always honored to be included. Thank you Copro Gallery for sharing my work for the last 20 yrs. Contact gallery for purchase.
Hope you have a killer weekend
X
This Death Rider came into being in 2023, echoing the “life” of the original Death Rider from 2016 that inspired my Deathrider Gasoline perfume. This piece is titled Killing Time and hangs in my studio, where I often revisit her. The research for the drawing began on December 12 and continued throughout the two months it took me to complete it. Each part of the composition took more time than you can imagine, as most of my drawings do.
The tank of the bike was originally made as a miniature in clay and photographed in different positions. The lace, jewels, and baubles come from a box of reference materials I’ve collected and reused in many drawings over the last 20 years. The cicadas and moths are from my personal collection. The skeleton is an old scientific model I bought off Craigslist, which I broke apart and scattered in different places. The thorns are from my rose garden. The sissy bar was fabricated and embellished with a couple of old Christ corpuses taken from my collection of crucifixes. I often model poses myself to ensure the anatomy is as realistic as possible. See the photo where I covered my tattoos to better observe my own muscles and bony prominences. Included is the final image, along with some the ridiculous things I do in the background to make a piece come to life.
I hope you enjoy. Oh yeah—and have a killer Friday.
X
