Connecting through art

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Although Liz Landgren, a local acrylic painter and artist, recently has begun to paint some portraits, she still paints a ton of other scenes — for example, the Homewood High School Band attending the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Landgren, who has lived in Homewood with her family since just after she married in 1998, decided to paint a scene of the band, with her son playing drums in the New York parade, all from memory.

Even though it was at times a hard scene to paint and required a lot of detail, she said she had a blast creating it and eventually was able to sell the painting, plus prints and ornaments she made of the design, to pay for their family trip to New York to see her son perform.

“This is the thing I do where I don’t feel like I fail very much, the successful thing. I feel like I’m good at it, and I could do it no matter what. I feel like even if I lost use of my hands, I feel like I’d find a way to do it anyways,” Landgren said.

Some of the inspiration for her painting she gets from her life and even, at times, the city of Homewood. 

“I love strangers, and there’s lots of strangers around here and businesses and storefronts. I love my friends, but I tend to just want to just go and eat somewhere and walk around and look at all kinds of people in Homewood, and that’s a lot of fun. I really truly see variety in people, and it’s great. I love new people,” Landgren said. 

Her favorite paintings, she said, are the ones where she’s able to connect with people through her more meaningful pieces of art, which is where her work tends to turn these days. Landgren said she has drawn ever since she remembered, but in high school, she didn’t recognize art as something with much value. 

She chose to attend college at Ole Miss as an art major, where she got her first formal training in oil painting. Shortly after graduating, she got married and had children. Because she didn’t want to paint with oils while pregnant, she stopped painting for a while.

But, she said, art didn’t leave her life forever. Landgren remembers eventually getting out her acrylic paints—which to this day is still her main type of paint she uses—and doing a big painting of her family’s dog. A woman fell in love with the painting and asked Landgren to paint her dog, as well. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’d never painted anything for anybody for money,’ and so I did it, and she loved it. It kind of opened up this whole world,” Landgren said. “She had cancer at the time, too, so I felt like I’d really kind of been involved in her life and I loved that.”

That was the first of many paintings Landgren would do where she would get the opportunity to bring joy into someone’s life. 

She started to do pet portraits more often and got some press attention, eventually making enough money to stay home and paint instead of working a retail job. She started to shift her focus to painting angels and churches, which people loved, she said, in addition to nativity scenes. 

She also makes handmade ornaments by repainting and collaging her other works, which she sells locally at art shows and Homewood stores. 

Nowadays, Landgren said, she rarely gets commissioned for pet portraits. 

“Then it just evolved into people, a lot of people. Mainly what I enjoy the most is connecting with whoever or whatever I’m painting. I’m doing a portrait right now of four kids, and I feel like I know them by the time I finished. I do pray for them while I’m painting,” she said. 

One of her most meaningful paintings over the years was for a young mother with cancer. One of the woman’s friends contacted Landgren about doing something for her that would show love and support. 

“She said, ‘I like the way you paint and connect with the spiritual and the aspect of what God is doing,’” Landgren said. 

Landgren suggested they cover the woman “with prayer” through a collage of favorite handwritten notes, poems and Bible verses, mailed to her by all her friends. Landgren got so many letters, she said, and when she finished the piece, she barely had words to describe how special it was to her. 

Another painting dear to Landgren’s heart, she said, was when she painted the victims from the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School as angels worshiping God. Through the painting, she was able to raise money and donate it.

“Sometimes I’m completely in awe with what I’m able to do,” she said, adding she credits God for her art skills.

When she was commissioned by a research company to paint a mural in summer 2018 for a government agency partnership for the All of Us health initiative, she got to choose to paint a face that would represent the city. She called it “Addie Cecelia,” inspired by the names of the four young girls who died in the church bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. 

The girl’s face in Landgren’s painting is pictured blowing a dandelion.

“Really, when I think about Birmingham, I think of the face of what we’ve been through, and I think of trying to move forward instead of moving back,” she said. “So that’s what the dandelions represented … kind of taking the old and blowing new seeds to plant new ones.”

Half of the mural was her painting and half was covered in snapshots of the people that attended the event. After the day-long event, the mural was transported back to California to be placed with similar murals from cities all over the country. 

Occasionally though, Landgren said, she wants to just “throw paints on canvas” and paint for fun like everyone else, though at this point, people expect her work to have some meaning behind it. In 2019, she hopes to continue painting people and faces. Some of her prints sell locally at the Homewood Pharmacy. 

To see some of her work or buy pieces, go to instagram.com/lizlandgren_art.