Feature by Jane Loughman
Photos by Maria Shaughnessy
On the Lerner ramps, I chatted with multimedia artist Lindsay Kornguth about her visual art and music, beginning by looking at her early portraits of celebrities. From YUNGBLUD in color pencil to Brendon Urie on graphite on paper, Lindsay used to share these portraits on her Instagram in high school, hashtagging and tagging the names behind the famous faces. However, Lindsay believes these portraits are not simply a way for her to garner attention from these A-listers. She doesn’t see them as tributes to the artists, but rather as her own work. Actors, singers, bands, and fictional characters are important for Lindsay’s inspiration, not just for her visual art but also for her own career as a musician.
(Left) Colored Portrait Study (YUNGBLUD), (Right) Black and White Portrait Study (Brendon Urie)
Since developing her skills in portraiture, Lindsay has branched out into animation and graphic design, and now majors in computer science with a concentration in visual art. However, Lindsay’s lowest grade in high school was in visual arts. Despite her parents spotting hints of a creative gene in young Lindsay’s doodles and sketches and later enrolling her in art classes, her high school art teacher did not respect her work. The teacher wanted Lindsay to make “real art,” not “cute” portraits of famous people and characters. Lindsay contests that point of view, and rather, views her work as a practice in perception; she says this herself on her website, which notes, “whatever I end up doing in life, I must somehow express my unique perception of the world.”
Black Panther
“I'm making something original. I'm seeing things the way that I see them. When I make portraits, it starts more with a fascination for the art itself, and drawing faces [...] is something that I always found extremely difficult,” she says.
Lindsay is often eager to take on new art forms, but she can be hesitant if it does not come naturally. She used to have a grudge against digital art, but now she is a big fan of her drawing tablet, with which she recently created a Spider-Man graphic. Lindsay tells me working on a tablet feels like sketching on paper, so she didn’t feel too out of her comfort zone. Since starting college and taking classes, she has also developed an interest for animation. She created a stop motion flipbook animation of Octopus, in which you can see her combine her skills in drawing with her love for visual storytelling.
Spidey
Visual storytelling is still evident in her earlier works, as Lindsay enjoys playing with traditional subjects in art. 2 Cool 4 Skuul, an anatomical study of the skull drawn with prismacolors, introduces color to a classical art training exercise. Dance Macabre features another skull, but within it is an optical illusion of two fencers. In Portrait Distortion, Lindsay distorts a marble statue using graphite.
Lindsay values her years of art training, but she has a love-hate relationship with studio art classes. In these classes, the subjects couldn’t include the likes of celebrity portraits, much to her dismay. Younger Lindsay would find class teachings, like routinely drawing hands to perfect the bodily form, frustrating. Now, she has reconciled with her adversity to classical drawing techniques, realizing that it's part of a learning process: "You're not going to get better unless you do the kind of boring things."
The classes have paid off as Lindsay has mastered drawing the hand. Her piece Submerged, a technically complex piece involving differing textures of water, foam, and bubbles features a man with cuts on his face and hand. The mark on his hand is small and subtle, but one can feel the wound. In Detailed Texture Study, as its title suggests, Lindsay again experiments with texture, this time with the texture of dripping blood instead of scratches. “I wanted to capture the feeling of blood coming down the wrist,” she tells me, and she does create that sensation viscerally with thick lines. For this piece, she was inspired by Panic! at the Disco’s album Pray for the Wicked, the “devil’s key,” and gore featured in Brendon Urie’s music videos. Though she takes inspiration from outside sources, Lindsay has found personal meaning in her drawing’s symbolism: “The fist feels triumphant, and it's covered in blood, which is kind of gory. It was more this idea of getting out of something painful. To me, the key represents new opportunities, new paths, and moving forward.”
(Left) Submerged, (Right) Detailed Texture Study
Music, particularly album art or music video aesthetics, forms crucial inspiration for Lindsay. Inverted Recreation is, as the title suggests, a recreation of Missio’s cover art for their song 'Everybody Gets High,' drawn as a photo negative and inverted. For a recent graphite drawing, Living Vicariously, Lindsay uses visuals from Muse’s music video for ‘Won’t Stand Down.’ She plays with the idea of control and technology: “the hand is not like the one that's playing. [The machine] is playing the hand that's playing the piano, which I thought was kind of trippy.”
Living Vicariously
Inverted Recreation
Lindsay finds her relationship to music and her connection to art very similar. She describes the two practices as being “locked-in”, both with “rhythmic” and “repetitive” qualities After playing piano for thirteen years, she moved over to the guitar, picking it up very quickly with her musical background. She started a punk rock band—The Blowouts—at Columbia in her first year, but since the pandemic began, Lindsay has been focusing on her own music, uploading covers to YouTube. She was discovered by the record label 11:11 Music Group after her cover of Glass Animals’s ‘Heat Waves’ garnered tens of thousands of views. Together, they mixed the cover for Spotify, and it now has over 180,000 plays.
“So that's how that happened—it was just exciting. But other than that, I haven't been dropping a ton of music, so it's funny because I've got like one song on my Spotify.”
Lindsay does have original music on her Soundcloud, both songs having her own cover art designs. During quarantine, when Lindsay was cooped up in her music studio, she reflected on how life had changed drastically at the beginning of her formative college years. So, with MUSE as an inspiration, she created the alternative rock piece ‘THUNDR.’ Making the song allowed Lindsay to develop her range as a vocalist. When she sang for The Blowouts in a more punk manner, her vocals in her ‘Heat Waves’ cover are soft and dreamy, while in her original songs ‘GHOST’, it’s energetic, and in ‘THUNDR’ it’s moody.
Music was an escape for Lindsay during quarantine, and she felt that the isolation was essential for her creativity and flow. Moving back to New York and experiencing the city opening up again complicated her ability to make music in the same way. “Going insane in my room is the main inspiration for a lot of the art that I made. I didn't have as much of that type of setting [when I moved back here], which I thought I needed to make art. I thought I could only create things if I was locked up somewhere.” Lindsay is currently working on adjusting this attitude, as she realizes that that kind of isolated lifestyle was no longer sustainable. Now, she believes that by giving herself space and time to reflect, “things will come naturally.”
As an artist, Lindsay sees no limits to her creativity. She is often questioned about how she has many artistic endeavors, that it sometimes comes across to others that she has “no idea what the hell [she] want[s] to do” with herself. But Lindsay does have an idea: she hopes to employ her drawing skills as an animator, all while keeping up with her many other artistic practices. To Lindsay, artists shouldn’t feel limited to one area or medium. Inspiration comes in many forms, and ideas need to have the freedom to be executed in a variety of ways. Making art is like an addiction, she tells me, that surpasses any one medium.
You can keep up with Lindsay Kornguth’s work on her website and reach out to her for commissions or collaborations through her Instagram, @lindsaykornguth.