Lucien created the Rain Paintings after deep processing with considered inspirations and mood boards. He describes the paintings as autobiographical, emotional depictions of the feelings he held inside at the point of creation, pulling past works or contemporary inspirations together according to personal synthesis. "I don't just make stuff so that I can make money,” he says. “The art that I make are things that I just want to see out there in the world, little breadcrumbs that I want to leave.”
For Lucien, finally, the work can receive the air and space to be considered outside of the politics of the gallery space and auction system. I think the work deserved the opportunity to be seen outside of a commercial context,” he says. “That's what a museum is. That's what an institution is. It doesn't care about how much money the paintings sell for, it's just about the integrity and the quality of work.”
After many years in the spotlight, in the face of criticism, and as a sort of creative butterfly all over the art and design world, it is a point of healing for Lucien to present the works plainly as paintings from the artist Lucien Smith.
At this point, I mention to Lucien something peculiar that I noticed while researching him: I wasn’t able to find even one article that mentioned his race, and if he found it as peculiar as I did. “I mean, shit, man. I'm glad you brought that up,” he says. “I've been thinking about it a lot, definitely because of what's going on in the world today. I come from a mixed background, you know, my mom is Asian. My dad is African American. I've had to move to so many different schools because of my parents' situation that I was thrown into so many different identities, you know, like going from public school to private school, playing sports, and being more art-oriented. I've always been a chameleon sort of way, adjust to the demographic of my surroundings.”
Lucien speaks on his attempts to address his relationship with his race and the distance he had with it when he was younger. “I'm not proud of that,” he says. “it wasn't that I was a fraud as a kid, but I feel embarrassed, like when I was in Louisiana, why wasn't I just myself, why did I act like I was more into sports than I am, you know? And it was just because at an early age I was moving around so much that I was never really able to form a real identity, you know? Every moment that I finally felt like I was becoming who I was, I would be thrown into another situation. I would get lost and I've kind of carried that with me. I think that is why I have never been able to identify as a person of color, you know?”
Lucien believes that, because of the sort of racial ambiguity he adopted throughout his childhood in his attempts to fit in, he wasn’t restricted to racial expectations. “I've been able to live my life free of some of the stuff that other people who are of color have to go through,” he offers. “I have always tried not to include race in my art because it's not really who I am, you know? I want to make my art and what I'm doing accessible and inviting. I understand that other people want to make theirs as a means to open up a window into their perspective. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are just two different types of ways of creating."
As we are currently living in a time that systemic racism and the ways race pervades through all systems of western capitalism have been brought to the public sphere, Lucien has begun to rethink his place in his art. “Looking back now during all this stuff, I'm starting to wonder if that was the right thing to do, you know? Am I not being true to my roots and my heritage? I'm not making Black art, you know, because I'm not fully Black and I'm not making Filipino art because I’m not fully Filipino. I think about it all the time. I'm not shy or embarrassed or insecure about my ethnicity. I just don't think it defines me. And I think that that has transferred into my work and has allowed people to perceive my work outside of just my identity.”
Lucien points to Black artists like David Hammons, the legendary artist who has been a defining figure in not only postmodern form but in our modern understanding of what is possible in art creation. He acknowledges with respect that artists like Hammons and his attention to race is not only essential to his form but adds to his revolutionary nature. Though, Lucien’s paintings, to Lucien, is about Lucien, and he’s not trying to claim any more than that.
I ask Lucien if he thinks his abstract form and the absence of any overt mentions of race in his paintings have anything to do with his early embrace from the art world, as artists of color, more often than not, are left out of the conversation of transformations of the American canon. Lucien, categorically, does not believe the art world embraced him at all. “I would think of it more like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. They’re intertwined but they're always battling one another.”
For someone that has had success as great as his, especially his financial success at such a young age, it’s hard to believe that the art world doesn’t like him. He begins to concede that perhaps there is truth to the assertion that his color-blind attitude toward his art may have affected his success. “I feel much more like an outsider, you know, even though it may not appear that way,” he offers. “I've never felt welcomed. The art world to me is like twenty-five people who I can name, who don't like me very much, you know? It’s hard for me to say.”
I offer that perhaps his choice not to include race in the Rain Paintings in favor of an adherence to abstract expressionism was in a way a rebellion against what the art world expects from an artist of color. Lucien then reconsiders and begins to suggest that he felt uncomfortable bringing his race into his art as he never felt the effects of racism personally enough to justify including it in his artistic expression. “I'd probably get in trouble for this, but I just didn't want to play the ‘Black card.’ It just didn't seem right to me because I didn't grow up with a lot of that.” He is more concerned with issues like poverty or education access, issues that are not exclusive to communities of color. Although, he does stand firm that the art world does not do nearly enough to address economic or racial issues and in many ways perpetuates them. “I've seen the inner workings of the upper echelon,” he says, “and I understand why art is so wealthy or is so speculative because it's the bragging rights. It's the highest you can go. There are cars, there are houses, there's real estate, but then it's like, ‘I own this many Andy Warhols or this many Basquiats, you know?’”
To Lucien, art and politics are intertwined because of the elite’s obsession with high art, and the ignorance that artistic institutions perform only reproduces the inequality in the art market. “I don't take art that seriously,” he says, “and I don't take people in the art world are markets that seriously, but they should be taken seriously because they are involved with people who decide how our lives are run.”