Lydia Kann
Lydia is a visual artist and a writer. This summer she is publishing a graphic novel, Germaine’s Daughter, containing 100 large scale paintings and text about the legacy of war and debilitating illness over three generations. She exhibits the paintings from the project at galleries in L.A., where she lives. Lydia is returning to Paris for a two-month residency summer 2025 at the Cité Internationale des Arts, where she had a yearlong residency 2017-2018 and conceived Germaine’s Daughter.
Lydia writes fiction and nonfiction including short stories, essays, novels and memoir. Many are stories of women and men overcoming adversity — psychological and external challenges such as poverty, illness, immigrant life, war, and gender conflict. She is interested in both the personal/domestic and the historical/sociological experience.
“The combination of being a therapist for a living, and an artist and writer as my creative passions, has led me to a love of story. My installations and painting create environments that often have a narrative. When the viewer is moved and responds to the world I’ve conceived, I’m thrilled. It’s the resonance between the artist’s expression and the viewer’s associations that makes the magic.”
The subject matter and materials overlap in Lydia’s art and writing. The work in both is made on and of paper and circles themes of power and adversity, acknowledging the relationship of the individual to the natural world and to the complicated realm of human connection.
Kann has made art and written since her childhood in New York City and Los Angeles. Her day job as a psychotherapist deeply influences her creativity. Listening to stories and finding effective alternatives with patients helps her envision multiple ways to convey an artistic concept and to dive deep in expressing emotion.
Bicoastal her whole life, Kann moved to Western Massachusetts after college, and recently returned to L.A. to fulfill her lifelong dream of waking and painting to the sound of the sea.