As you might guess from her last name, installation artist and painter Lyora Pissarro has a famous relative. Her great-great-grandfather is none other than Camille Pissarro, a painter who was instrumental in the Impressionist art movement. His legacy has been passed down to his descendants, and across five generations, there have been 17 painters in the family.
Pissarro grew up alongside her creative mother—also a painter—who taught her daughter to paint by copying images—a standard part of an art education. She spent many years with this approach, but came to a crossroads once she made it to collegiate art school. Critiques there pushed her to think of something new. This was complicated, however, by her family. “[I was] trying to come up with something unique, trying to be really good, trying to be worthy of my last name,” Pissarro tells My Modern Met.
Open to new possibilities, the artist eventually had the opportunity to integrate new technology into her work. Now, Pissarro paints landscapes—like her great-great-grandfather—but with a contemporary twist. Her circular painted pieces depict idyllic scenes punctuated with projection mapping in collaboration with Oliver Allaux. The results are as tranquil as they are ever-changing, inviting moments of reflection during a time when life seems increasingly chaotic.
My Modern Met had the chance to talk with Pissarro about her artistic background, family legacy, and charting her own path. Scroll down for our exclusive interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your artistic background.
I come from this kind of really big family of artists, art historians, curators, and art dealers. My family is kind of at the intersection of like every side of the art world, which is really inspiring and crazy and unique.
My mom is a painter and was my first art teacher. The context of the family is that my great-great-grandfather was the founder of Impressionism. His name was Camille Pissarro, and he painted with Cezanne, Monet, and Renoir, and they were in a French crew of painters.
Camille taught all of his sons and one daughter how to paint, and somehow this family kept painting. So it’s rare when you look at the modern masters that you see, like maybe one or two of their kids, continued painting. But this is five generations, 17 painters across 150 plus years. It’s really, really, really unique. And this is on my mom’s side of the family, but my dad has a gallery in London called Stern Pissarro Gallery, and they represent the five generations.
(continued) You see in one space how they all influenced each other and what their journey was of honoring the name, but also the burden of it. So that has a whole history and legacy in itself. But for me, as a child, I just really liked painting, and I wasn’t necessarily very good at it. I just really enjoyed it.
I would run home from school, and my mom would have all of these folders and subjects [of things like] horses, landscapes, clouds, and portraits. I would pick a folder, pick an image, make my canvas, and put my apron on. I would sit next to her and like prepare my image to copy.
When I got to art school, I had this technique and this history and this plan that I had been in for so many years. The turning point was that the school critiqued my technique as kind of boring. They were pushing on me in a great way to say, why do you think it’s interesting that you’re taking an image from nature and you’re copying it and that's your art?
I had a really hard time in art school, kind of grappling with coming from this big family of painters. Trying to come up with something unique, trying to be really good, trying to be worthy of my last name. And then also coming up with a clear plan of how I would be an interesting artist.
Your work focuses on landscapes. What attracts you to them?
The Impressionists were at the forefront of painting outdoors because of the invention of the oil painting tube. It was the first time in the history of art that they could take art materials out of the studio and paint outside. So the landscapes were a really big part of that.
Camille Pissarro was an anarchist, and he was very interested in peasants, people who were working the land, farmers, and the people who were not deemed worthy of being painted. They weren’t noble enough or wealthy enough back then. So landscapes were a very predominant subject in the history of the paintings in my family and on the walls of my home. We had an ever-evolving art collection because my father is an art dealer.
We grew up with these paintings, these beautiful landscapes, and I would eat breakfast next to them. Then they would go, and then another one would come in, and I would get used to getting attached and then letting it leave.
To myself, early on, I [considered] can I, as a contemporary city girl living in this decade, make landscapes interesting? Are landscapes outdated and stale, or can I find a way? Do I have references to other contemporary artists who are making them really interesting?
How has the way you see landscapes changed (or not) throughout the years?
The biggest revelation was when I discovered a circular canvas, which was a mixture of two things. I went to a show, I saw a circular painter, and then I went to the art store, and there was a circular canvas, and I bought it. That shape was the beginning of deconstructing the traditional edges that I had been raised with, this very traditional rectangle format, and the circle literally bent the shape of the landscape in a way that was mind-blowing for me.
A whole series that came out was realizing that the tight structure that I had been raised with could transform into endless different possibilities, and [what] started coming out of me were hundreds of these circular landscapes. It was almost like a therapy to come out of what I had been raised with, which was just so freeing.
Can you share more about the union of art and technology in your work?
At some point, I was invited, by the Aman Hotels, to do a solo exhibition at Amangiri in Utah. I went to Utah and started studying the topography and the landscape, and just seeing the mountains around there and pulling that into my aesthetic.
The curator of the show asked me if I wanted to perform for the opening of the show. And I found the question kind of strange because I don’t really perform, I present. It led me to ask a friend of mine, Oliver Allaux, who does projection mapping, if he wants to perform with me and project on the canyons. And he said, why project on the canyons when we could project on your paintings?
I found that really strange because I’m working on the show for a year, and we would just hide the artwork that I was presenting. And then, as I said that, I found that actually to be really interesting. We ended up kind of experimenting, and he projected on 12 paintings live, and we never intended to sell them. At the opening, people requested to purchase, and we were not equipped to sell the technology and to figure out how to make projection mapping commercialized.
It’s a very complicated technology, and you can hire someone to do projection mapping, but to actually buy it and own it and make it user-friendly has been something that we ended up brainstorming, figuring out, and refining for the last five years.
Are there pieces you feel best encapsulate what you do?
I feel like every time we make something new, especially because the technology is evolving so fast, the newest thing we make ends up being the thing we think encapsulates the most of what we are doing. Old and new are all part of this bigger artistic research. And so I don’t have particular pieces that stand out. I have two that I’m looking at in the studio right now that I really love and that I’m really excited by. I’m also doing a big stained glass window project on the West Coast, which I’m also excited about because that’s a new medium.
I’m just really excited about what’s happening in the world right now with technology and how technology can help us as humans understand more about the human experience. I have really big dreams for the next five, 10 years, like what kind of things I want to create with biosensors, and at the intersection of wellness and health, and AI and art and technology, and seeing a little deeper into the human psyche and the human well-being aspect.
That’s a really big dream, [creating] exhibitions on emotions, or exhibitions that can give you insight into your sleep patterns or your happiness. I’d love to see art like that has a bit more of a deeper therapeutic function.
As we close out, what do you hope the viewer takes away from your work?
I think in a world where we’re shouting for attention, and everything’s just moving so fast, the two things that I hope are that I can create a space that’s peaceful, and that’s calming to the nervous system. And that invites a pause for a few seconds.
I think with the projection mapping, because it’s moving really slowly and it's just this really kind of ethereal visual, it really holds your attention for a few minutes. I’ve seen people slow down internally for a second. If that’s what I can achieve as an artist, I feel like that, to me, is a huge accomplishment in a world that is just so mad and so intense.
