Lori
Anderson.
- Oil on canvas & linen
- San Francisco, California
The light here is cold and even and forgives nothing. That's the point — a face has nowhere to hide, and neither do I.
Oil painter by day, arts teacher by night.
Lori Anderson paints people the way you remember them — not as they posed, but as they were between poses. She works in oil, slowly, often returning to a single canvas across weeks until the likeness stops being a likeness and becomes a presence.
Born in 1984, she trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent a decade on commissioned portraits before turning, in 2019, to the quieter work she makes now: figures caught mid-thought, hands at rest, the ordinary dignity of a face given time.
She works from a north-facing studio in San Francisco, where the light is cold and even and forgiving of nothing. Each month she releases one new painting to the club — a print to every member, and the original to one.
From the club.
The first thing Lori fixed was the jaw — set, certain, unbothered. Everything else in the painting defers to it. Worked in oil over three weeks, mostly in the cold morning light, with the warm ground left to show through at the edges so the figure reads as lit from inside rather than out. This month's original goes to one member by draw.