Interview: Luna Charlotte
Luca Curci talks with Luna Charlotte during the 6th Edition of ROME INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR 2023, at Medina Art Gallery.

An artist, traveler, diver, and practitioner of magical things, Luna inspires herself with the many facets of what exactly it means to be alive. She has traveled to 33 countries, submerging herself into the culture of every place she sets foot, learning languages, participating in different spiritual practices, and experiencing the world from as many doors of perception as humanly possible. Her mission as an artist shifts and changes as she does, as she grows, and as the people and places she surrounds herself with leave imprints on her way of perceiving the world. Luna Charlotte is well known for her attention to detail and the dream-like realms she creates with paint. Luna was raised in Canada, born to French parents. She felt a calling towards the world of art from a very young age – 5 to be exact – and pursued it despite the challenging road it proved to be. When she took a leap of faith and began her full-time career as an artist, she lived in her car, living penny to the penny and jumping on every occasion to live paint and showcase her work – even if it meant spending every penny to her name to get there. Luna always believed if she followed where her art took her, she would always be exactly where she was meant to be. Her efforts paid off and in under 5 years she built a fully sustainable and thriving business out of her art, showcasing her work all across the globe at hundreds of events, and most importantly, inspiring many souls to follow their heart’s calling.

Luca Curci – What are you currently working on?
Luna Charlotte – I always seem to have a million projects on the go. Currently, I’m largely focused on creating a finished piece of art every day for an entire year as a part of an art challenge. I’m also working on creating an Oracle deck, and I’m refining my techniques for UV reactive art that works with chroma 3D glasses. In other words – artwork that comes off the canvas when viewed under UV light with the glasses. I’m also working on a series of desert paintings. I’ve been painting mostly oceans for years and I like stepping out of my comfort zone and experimenting with new color palettes and themes.

LC – What’s your background? What is the experience that has influenced your work the most?
LC – I originally studied photography at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. I dropped out after my second year in search of a deeper understanding of life, where I went on a 6-month adventure through South and central America. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing for many years. I would just travel and get temporary employment in places to fund my next plane ticket. I spent many years doing this before fully committing and choosing to pursue art. I have now been a practicing full-time artist for 7 years. At the start of my journey as an artist when I first made the leap and decided to pursue this path, I actually lived in my car, driving from event to event, showcasing my work and always making barely enough sales at each event to put enough gas in my car to get to the next one. I started sharing my work internationally a year and a half into my art career when I was invited to do some live art performance and showcase my work at a festival in Australia. From there, it was s snowball effect. Since then, I have performed and showcased work at hundreds of events in 14 different countries. I have also been blessed with the opportunities to study with masters such as Luis Tamani and Fabiano Milani. It’s been a wild ride of an adventure for sure, and it’s nowhere close to over. I can’t wait to see where else my art takes me. As for the experience that has most influenced my work, I would have to say SCUBA diving. Although the rest of my travels and experiences of cultures from around the world have been deeply influential, nothing quite changed the trajectory of my art the way diving did. There’s something so powerful and magical about the ocean and my connection to it that I can’t put into words. My art feels like the only way to capture that. It also allows me to feel like I’m still underwater while I’m painting which is the place that feels the most like home to me.

LC – Is there an unrealized or unrealizable project, even a crazy one, that you would like to work on?
LC – If there’s one thing I have no problem doing, it’s dreaming big when it comes to art. I would love to create a beautifully painted octopus identification book (there are over 360 species that we know of!). I want to build sculptures of reefs in ocean-side cities out of trash locally collected from the ocean, beaches and city, getting the community involved in the creation of public art. This would raise awareness, educate, clean up the area, and provide a piece of public art that could be enjoyed over the years. I want to build a temple, a place of connection to nature and the spiritual realms somewhere on a beach so I could incorporate the tides into the architecture. I could go on. If I had the resources to create without limit, I would be building cities as works of art, down to beautifully illustrated books in the libraries, monuments of epic proportions with intricate hand-painted murals, public art engineered to generate clean electricity, gardens planted with intention, houses that feel like something out of another dimension. My imagination is definitely not my limiting factor when it comes to the creation of art.

LC – What are the three hashtags essential to define your poetics that you could not give up?
LC – This is a funny question because I don’t really care much for hashtags, I only use them out of necessity. I also don’t like defining my work too much, I love all the layers of different interpretations that come from different human experiences. If I define my work too much, it takes away the creative ways in which people can immerse themselves in my work and discover themes I hadn’t even noticed myself. I create for myself as my therapy – how people see my work is up to them and I don’t want to put them in a box by telling them what they should find within it. The hashtags I use on social media change constantly.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
LC – The ocean, my travels, all the beautiful cultures I’ve experienced, the beauty of nature, the depth of human connections, the strange and fascinating creations of evolution and the biodiversities and niches it’s created, other people’s art, the way people move through the world and interact with each other, spirituality, science, philosophy, psychology, the pondering of what it means to exist… Art is a channeling of my experience which is not something that will ever be captured through shape and color, let alone the limitations of language. I could never pinpoint a specific place, experience, or thing from which my inspiration derives as it’s always shifting and moving based on my emotions, my growth, my understanding of reality and my experience of it all at the moment in which I put the paint to the canvas.

LC – What is the message linked to the artwork you have shown in this event? How is it connected to the theme of the entire exhibition?
LC– I exhibited two paintings at the Rome International Art Fair. My first painting, “Desolate”, was linked to the exhibition theme of Future Landscapes. It is a piece capturing the vastness of the desert and a metaphor for finding one’s self through isolation. When you are somewhere as unforgiving as the desert, there is a rawness and realness that is experienced – that is what I intended to capture in this piece. My second painting, “The Abyss” fell more under the Mixing Identities theme as it was an exploration of consciousness and self. It was never intended to become a finished painting as it was just a place for me to experiment and shove pigments around. I actually ended up loving this exploration so much I eventually refined it into a finished work of art and framed it.

LC – We were attracted by your last artistic production, has the artwork presented been created for the exhibition or as a part of preexisting works?
LC – The art was part of a pre-existing body of work. I prefer to work on my own timelines with my own themes and then find the exhibits within which these fit rather than the other way around, it just suits my workflow and processes better.

LC – Do you think ITSLIQUID GROUP can represent an opportunity for artists?
LC – I believe it can. It’s pretty cool to have your work hanging on a wall halfway across the world. This is a very different audience and space than where I’m used to sharing my work, so it’s a nice way to expand and explore more facets of the art world.

LC – Did you enjoy cooperating with us?
LC – Definitely. It was a pleasant experience, communication was clear, everything was dealt with with a high level of professionalism.

LC – What do you think about ITSLIQUID Platform?
LC – I actually had never heard of ITSLIQUID until someone sent me a link to this platform. I love the wide variety of opportunities that are available for artists and collectors alike through this platform. I look forward to seeing and experiencing more of what ITSLIQUID does.