Lydiane Lutz is a freelance artist in Ulm. Characteristic of her painting with acrylic and watercolor are her refreshingly intimate scenes of immersion in water. The bathing process as the theme of her body of work is a symbol for inner insights. In her painting, she searches for freedom, letting go, trust, and the sense of something greater.

She skillfully combines delicate, glazed, almost poetic surfaces with a thick, bold brushwork that moves powerfully and freely. A tension like life itself: powerful, breaking open, but also fragile and vulnerable. She arranges her works with a sketch-like lightness—like a splash of water powerfully occupying space while still leaving room. Intense color tones, with occasional neon colors, create a vibrant relationship between subject and movement.

At the beginning is the image idea: a sense, a feeling. As inspiration, the artist often takes a film still, a freeze-frame from one of her self-made films: how she steps into the water, immerses herself in a dress, swims. A lighting mood, a facial expression, or a water tone—as soon as she has found a point that speaks to her, she fully immerses herself in the process. Then everything is color, image, and surface. Like a wave dance, she approaches the image in coming and going. Close to the canvas, she deliberately sets colors, brushstrokes, and surfaces against each other. From further away, she observes the whole, approaches again with concentrated vision, connects and contrasts. Powerful, refreshing, feeling.

“When I immerse myself, my body becomes very light and the heaviness dissolves. I move more freely, let go. Do I dare to let myself be carried? I am embedded in something greater, everything flows and surrounds me in this transparent element. With playful joy, I surface. And like a gift, the incoming light shines into the water and shimmers fascinatingly on the surface. Life is like this again and again: daring and letting go. Powerfully immersing oneself in the new. And then hopefully feeling in the uncontrollable: I am carried.”
Lydiane Lutz

Where do I feel free? Where am I allowed to be? These are the questions that move and inspire me as an artist. My paintings of swimmers open spaces of experience. Water becomes a projection surface for emotional processes and a place of self-discovery.

For me, swimming in open waters brings ambivalent emotions. It requires courage to venture into the unknown. To jump into the water, to immerse, to submerge. At the same time, the weightless feeling of being carried is incomparable. When I am enveloped by water, I feel free and uplifted.

One needs trust to let oneself be carried by water. That touches me. It is a mystery that I can only experience sensually and cannot grasp with the mind. The leap into water is always a risk for me. I do not know what awaits me. But after the leap into the unknown, I experience anew each time how I am enveloped by the element of water with all its strength, dynamism, and vitality. I float, carried by something greater than myself.

This experience is a symbol for life processes that I go through again and again. In my painterly exploration, these multilayered feelings find expression in the connection between powerful, dynamic brushstrokes and delicate, flowing color surfaces. The painting process is a realization of my memories. My wish is that my paintings also become spaces of hope for others.

Lydiane Lutz

since 2021 in an interdisciplinary studio community in Ulm
2012—2021 freelance in Ulm and time with my children
2002—2008 studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich
2001—2002 Free Art School Stuttgart

Lydiane Lutz studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and attended the Free Art School in Stuttgart. As the child of an artist, she engaged with painting from a very early age, visiting museums and churches with her mother. She looked closely, immersed herself in the colors, color harmonies, light, and brushstrokes—and in her free time loved to immerse herself in any water she could find. Even today she loves being in water, often with her children. In her works, she explores “going into the water”: spaces of longing that inspire, are hopeful and alive. She holds French and German citizenship, loves the French language and the country.

Uplifting—this is the most fitting way to describe the works of Lydiane Lutz. The artist works with an interplay of thick and glazed color surfaces. The pictorial motifs oscillate between impressionistically depicted figurative elements and expressive abstraction. A powerful energy emanates from the rich, luminous color palette.

Lydiane Lutz’s approach to painting is elemental. Her brushwork reveals the joy of color. Stylistically, the artist follows in the footsteps of the great masters of color such as John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot. In their sometimes abstract sketchiness, her works recall Monet’s late water lily paintings. The often French titles of her works are a homage to the artist’s French roots.

The play with different textures—sometimes glazed, sometimes thick—creates contrasting surfaces that unfold a sensual power. Voids and open spaces stimulate the imagination. In this way, atmospheric pictorial spaces emerge that invite one to fully engage with the painting and immerse oneself in it.

A recurring leitmotif is water. An element that unites opposites: softness and hardness, lightness and density, intimacy and sublimity. Depictions of swimming, floating bodies in water convey weightlessness and a feeling of being carried. The figures invite one to empathize with them. One could describe Lydiane Lutz’s painting as a kind of romantic expressionism, as it concerns the expression of intense emotional feelings.

The bubbling floods of color evoke memories of swimming in open waters: cold and warm currents, the ambivalence between feelings of happiness and awe before the unknown depths and the power of the element. Lydiane Lutz’s painting opens spaces of longing that convey freedom and playful lightness. In this way, she succeeds in evoking multilayered experiences and creating metaphors for life.

This painting is tremendously dynamic and very elegant. The brushstroke is not only very skillfully placed, this is not informal color pouring or slapping, but linearly guided composition of patches. Even James McNeill Whistler or Singer-Sargent would have found pleasure in this. The pink bikinis contrast most beautifully in a complementary way with the cool greenish-blue waves. And the interplay of the rather photographically rendered figures with the splashes around them also “works” in the academic sense that the proportions are right and there is not too much of one, the splashes, or too little of the other, the figures. Difficult to hit exactly the right register. Lydiane Lutz can do this with precision.

Brief overview of the artist and selected works.