AIDAN LAPP
About
I am a portraitist whose practice is rooted in observation, presence, and the slow act of looking. Making portraits is, for me, as much about seeing as being seen: a way of slowing down in a world that rarely does. My work begins with intimate sittings from life, using graphite to capture immediate, gestural impressions, which I then stain with layers of paint—building memory, mood, and material into the surface of the piece.
I consider myself a drawer who uses paint. Drawing offers an immediacy and intimacy that forms the backbone of my process, allowing me to respond directly to the nuances of my sitters—their physicalities, their emotional resonances, and the shifting atmospheres that emerge during our time together. My goal is not simply likeness but presence: to evoke the residue of a moment shared, the way a body changes the feeling of a room.
I believe that making portraits is a form of care. It is a way of insisting on slowness, attention, and depth—qualities that feel increasingly urgent. My work is less about invention for its own sake and more about deepening a lineage: building on traditions of observational figuration while finding new emotional truths through material experimentation.
Artists like Alice Neel, David Hockney, and Larry Stanton inform my practice—their ability to return again and again to the people in their lives, finding endless variation and humanity in the act of seeing. Like them, I am interested in the familiar made vivid, in preserving fleeting presences with tenderness and intensity.
I received my BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, where I also worked as a printshop monitor and completed fellowships with both Ox-Bow School of Art and Pratt Institute Editions. My work has been exhibited at Room 482 and AuxierKline in New York, and I recently curated SOOT: Works on Paper, a group exhibition featuring 30 emerging artists under 30.
My pleasures include: moths, blackberries, medieval ivory carved buckets, Point Reyes, candlelit dinners with friends, Derek Jarman, good sweaters, thistles, Kremer’s cobalt bottle green watercolor pan, The School of London, coffee, malbec, and orange newts. My recent displeasure: the tedious search for matching socks. The most unforeseen thing I did this year was foster a chameleon named Herbert.